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The    Ego  Book 

A   Book   of 
Selfish    Ideals 


By 
Vance    Thompson 


New  York 

E.  P.  Dutton  &  Company 

681   Fifth  Avenue 


Copyrijrht  1914 
By  E.  p.  DUTTON  &  COMPANY 


DR.  WILLIAM  J.  O'SULLIVAN 

Will  you  permit  me  to  inscribe  your  name  in 
this  little  book  of  Good  Intentions,  as  a  slight 
record  of  my  profound  admiration  for  the 
scientist  and  scholar  and  my  sincere  affection 
for  the  friend  ? 

Vance  Thompson. 


Contents 

CHAPTER  PACE 

I. — When  the  Ego  Wakes    .         i 

II. — How  TO  Protect  Your- 
self IN  THE  Family      .       29 

III. — How  TO  Get  the  Better 
OF  Your  Friends   and 

Enemies        ...       58 

IV. — How  the  Lover  can  Pro- 
tect Himself       .         .       89 

V. — How  to  Get  What  You 
Want  ;  also  How  to 
Prevent  Others  from 
Taking  It  away  from 
You     .         .         .         .119 

VI. — The  Hive  and  the  Bee  .     144 

VII. — How  TO  BE  Good  to  Your- 
self when  Dead  .     164 


The  Ego  Book 

Chapter  I 

When  The  Ego  Wafccs 

I 

I  WAS  waiting  for  a  train  in  a 
railway  station.  Huddled  on 
a  bench  was  a  black-skirted 
old  woman  in  cap  and  apron; 
she  sat  there  babbling  and  smil- 
ing at  something  that  lay  on 
her  lap.  I  drew  near  and  looked 
at  it.     Evidently  it  belonged  to 


0  THE  EGO  BOOK 

the  human  species.  It  was,  in- 
deed, a  new  bom  man,  almost 
bald  and  toothless. 

"Hail,  brother,"  I  said,  "and 
how  do  you  like  it  as  far  as  you've 
got?" 

He  blinked  up  at  me  with  pale, 
startled  eyes;  then  he  glanced  at 
the  old  woman ;  and  finally  he  fixed 
his  eyes  thoughtfully  on  his  pudgy 
right  hand.  Now  at  that  very 
moment — with  instantaneous  co- 
incidence— two  splendid  and  for- 
midable things  happened.  The 
first  was  this: 

The  new-bom  man  heard  a  voice 
which  was  not  my  voice  nor  that 
of  the  babbling  crone  in  whose 
lap  he  lay;  it  was  another  voice, 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES      3 

a  voice  of  exile,  a  voice  from  ex- 
tremely far-off,  faint  and  extenu- 
ate, but,  as  he  listened,  it  seemed 
to  verberate  in  him  like  bells;  and 
the  voice  said  to  him: 

"The  First  Person  is  the  One 
Who  Speaks, 

"The  Second  Person  is  the  One 
Spoken  to, 

"The  Third  Person  is  the  One 
Spoken  of; 

"I  am — thou  art — she  is," 
'  The  new-born  man  had  dis- 
covered his  ego;  it  had  dawned 
upon  him  that  he  was  himself — 
ipsissimus;  and  in  the  blinding 
glory  of  this  discovery  he  lifted 
up  his  voice  and  screamed  aloud. 

That  was  the  first  thing  that 


4  THE  EGO  BOOK 

happened;  the  second — quite  as 
splendid  and  nearly  as  formidable 
— was  that  I  determined  to  write 
this  book.  (There  was  the  first 
chapter  ready  to  my  hand.  Tooth- 
less and  almost  bald,  but  fierce- 
eyed  and  indomitable,  it  lay  there 
and  roared:  "I  am  here — take 
notice!") 

The  porters  and  casual  passen- 
gers saw  in  that  bundle  of  lace  and 
pink  flesh  merely  a  squalling  brat, 
for  (as  in  the  poem)  "still  the  brat 
squalled  on";  but  I  knew  better; 
I  knew  that  in  him  were  the  two 
mightiest  potentialities  on  earth: 
a  new-born  ego  and  a  book. 

In  him  there  was  an  ego  awake. 
The  man  inside  that  wingless  lump 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES      5 

of  flesh  had  begun  signalling  to  the 
outer  world.  He  had  differen- 
tiated his  individuality  from  the 
fluctuant  group-soul  of  humanity. 
He  was — at  that  splendid  moment 
— victoriously  himself.  For  a  long 
time  I  stood  there  looking  (with 
approval)  upon  that  significant 
performance;  but  at  last  I  began 
to  think  he  was  overdoing  it. 

I  said:  "Brother,  aren't  you 
exaggerating  your  importance?" 

"Not  to  myself,"  his  answer 
seemed  to  be. 

I  sat  down  beside  him  and  we 
stared  at  each  other  in  manly 
silence;  a  minute  passed. 

Now  the  beauty  of  talking  to 
a  new-bom  man  is  that  you  can 


6  THE  EGO  BOOK 

say  everything  to  him  —  every- 
thing. 

A  minute  passed. 

"Brother,"  said  I,  "the  question 
of  your  importance  is  debatable. 
Let  us  debate  it.  A  minute  has 
passed — and  in  that  minute  one 
hundred  human  beings  Hke  you 
(toothless  and  almost  bald)  were 
born  and  in  that  minute  one  hun- 
dred human  beings  (tending  to 
toothlessness  and  baldness)  died. 
The  calculation  is  not  my  own. 
It  was  made  long  ago.  It  has  the 
air  of  being  exact.  If  for  one  hour 
you  lie  squalling  on  that  lank 
aproned  lap,  exactly  six  thousand 
corpses  will  fall  to  right  and  left 
of  you;  and  exactly  six  thousand 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES       7 

new  fierce  voices  will  take  up 
the  wail  of  humanity.  Aren't  you 
laying  undue  stress  upon  your  own 
importance?  Indeed  there  is  more 
to  it  than  I  have  told  you,  for 
overhead  whirl  the  infinite  millions 
waiting  to  be  bom,  while  along  the 
earth-road  stumbles  the  countless 
multitude  that  has  not  yet  earned 
the  right  to  die." 

A  minute  passed. 

And  I  said:  "To  the  mathema- 
tical mind,  brother,  you  are  only 
the  hundredth  part  of  a  minute." 

This  seemed  to  sadden  him;  he 
wrinkled  up  his  face  and  ejected  a 
milky  substance  from  his  mouth; 
then  he  looked  at  me  in  a  con- 
versational  way   and   I  gathered 


8  THE  EGO  BOOK 

that  his  thoughts  were  something 
like  this:  "That  man  in  the  yellow 
necktie  is  interested  in  me;  it  is 
quite  natural;  and  I  daresay  he 
would  like  to  know  where  I  came 
from." 

"Indeed  there  has  been  some 
debate  on  that  subject,"  I  ad- 
mitted; "suppose  you  clear  up  the 
mystery.  You  may  be  merely  a 
'human  form  of  the  universal 
rhythm,'  as  the  quaint  scientists 
aver.  You  may  be,  as  a  quainter 
scientist  insists,  merely  a  'tem- 
porarily stable  form  of  intra- 
atomic  energy.'  Or,  you  may  be 
something  else — what?" 

The  new-bom  man  threw  him- 
self back  and  howled  with  derision. 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES      9 

The  aged  woman  tried  to  hush 
him.  She  said,  "shh — shh!"  and 
slapped  his  stomach;  but  my  ad- 
vice was:  "Roar,  brother,  and 
affirm  your  ego" — and  he  did. 
He  roared  and  affirmed  himself. 

That  is  the  way  man's  life  in 
the  world  begins. 

II 

There  is  nothing  so  absolutely 
fearless  as  the  new-bom  man.  He 
is  sheathed  in  flabby  flesh.  The 
light  stabs  his  eyes.  His  unfa- 
miliar intestines  do  not  stretch 
properly.  His  nerves  and  muscles 
are  not  rightly  coordinated.  There 
is  a  crack  in  the  top  of  his  unfin- 
ished skull.     The  kind  of  food  he 


lo  THE  EGO  BOOK 

gets  would  sicken  any  man.  And 
his  pulpy  body  is  so  small  it  may 
be  picked  up  and  tossed  about  like 
a  ball  of  cotton.  Quite  true;  but 
inside  the  small,  pulpy  body  there 
is  a  valiant  and  vehement  man 
who  does  not  know  what  fear  is. 
As  I  have  said,  he  knows  he  is 
himself — ipsissimus.  Why  should 
he  not  be  bold?  Frank  and  fear- 
less he  comes  into  the  world, 
screaming  "I  am  I,"  and  looks 
round  him  for  his  welcome. 

Now  it  is  a  melancholy  but 
indubitable  fact,  that  in  a  few 
years — ^by  the  time  he  is  short- 
coated  or  anyway  by  the  time  he 
is  breeched — all  this  fine,  open 
courage   is    driven    into   conceal- 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES     ii 

ment.  When  the  first  danger- 
signal  is  set  it  runs  for  cover.  I 
do  not  say  this  is  wholly  the  fault 
of  parents  and  guardians;  in  a 
measure  I  lay  it  to  our  defective 
organisation  of  society,  to  the  very 
structtire  of  social  life,  which 
places  the  child  in  an  environment 
of  grown-up  thought  and  grown-up 
action — thought  and  action  dis- 
torted by  the  harsh  and  artificial 
conditions  of  life;  and  this  works 
the  same  whether  the  new-bom 
man  begins  his  earth-adventure  in 
a  mansion  or  an  orphan-asylum. 

It  is  a  terrifying  truth  that  nine- 
tenths  of  human  felicity  depends 
upon  being  well  bom. 

By  this  statement  I  do  not  mean 


12  THE  EGO  BOOK 

felicity  depends  upon  having  been 
dandled  upon  the  knees  of  a 
duchess.  (Or  even  upon  the  knees 
of  a  viscountess.)  One  is  well 
bom  when  he  emerges  into  an 
environment  where  he  is  per- 
mitted to  be  himself  and  where 
he  may,  triimiphantly,  affirm  his 
individuality.  Now  this  does  not 
happen  to  one  new-bom  man  in 
ten.  And  that  is  the  reason  why, 
so  often,  childhood  is  a  dark  and 
tragic  thing.  Unafraid,  forth-com- 
ing, and  accessible,  the  young 
ego  confronts  the  old  world  which 
is  to  him  so  new.  And  the  world 
— amiably  or  ill-naturedly — pokes 
at  his  curves  and  snubs  off  his 
angles  and  tries  to  shape  him  all 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES     13 

over  again.  This  is  not  educa- 
tion, mark  you;  and  it  has  nothing 
to  do  with  education;  it  is  merely 
the  working  of  that  intolerant 
desire  which  is  in  every  one  of  us 
to  make  things  over  after  our  own 
image.  No  father  can  possibly 
conceive  that  his  son  wouldn't  be 
the  better  for  fitting  into  the 
pattern  he  has  cut  for  him. 

In  a  moment  of  profound 
thought  Plato  discovered  that  only 
one  thing  had  been  distributed  to 
the  entire  satisfaction  of  each  and 
of  every  man;  and  that  was  intel- 
lect. Every  man  is  perfectly  satis- 
fied with  his  brains.  He  may  regret 
that  he  is  not  six  feet  tall — that  his 
hair  is  red — that  he  walks  on  a 


14  THE  EGO  BOOK 

club-foot;  he  may  be  of  the  opin- 
ion that  wealth,  power,  rank, 
opportunity  have  been  dealt  out 
with  dolesome  inequality;  but 
never — for  an  instant — is  he  dis- 
satisfied with  the  intellect  bestowed 
upon  him.  Satisfied  with  it?  He 
is  so  proud  of  it  he  wants  to  set 
it  up  as  a  standard  for  all  the  little 
new-bom  men  who  fall  into  his 
hands.  There  are  no  exceptions. 
None  of  us  can  get  away  from  it. 
(Even  I,  an  essentially  modest 
man,  am  writing  these  pages  to 
convince  you  that  if  you  really 
want  to  be  good  to  yourself  you 
should  follow  my  way  of  think- 
ing.) 

That  is  what  the  new -bom  man 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES     15 

has  to  face  when  he  takes  his  ego 
out  for  an  airing  down  the  promen- 
ade of  life.  No  one  is  content  to 
let  him  be  himself.  Perhaps  a 
firm  parent  (Jerreus  est,  eheul) 
jams  the  young  ego  into  his  own 
iron  matrix;  perhaps  an  utter 
stranger  bends  it  into  his  own, 
peculiar  ideal  of  curvilinear  beauty. 
In  any  case  the  new-breeched 
ego  limps  home,  a  bruised  and 
battered  thing.  Do  you  wonder 
that  a  little  of  its  courage — once 
so  confident  and  careless — is  gone? 
When  the  new-born  man  has  got 
his  ego  home  again,  what  he  does 
— instinctively — is  to  set  about 
protecting  it.  If  he  is  a  fairly 
good  boy — as  you  were,  I  presimie, 


i6  THE  EGO  BOOK 

or  you  would  not  have  grown  up 
to  read  good  books — if  he  is  a 
good  boy,  I  say,  he  builds  round 
himself  a  wall  of  reticence.  He 
digs  holes,  deep  holes  and  tortuous 
burrows,  into  which  his  ego  can 
pop  at  the  first  sign  of  danger.  No 
longer  frank;  his  boldness  beaten 
down;  experience  has  taught  him 
the  pitiable  necessity  of  running  for 
cover.  It  is  a  sad  thing;  and  it 
makes  for  thought.  There  is 
something  wrong  when  almost 
every  breeched  boy  has  to  lead  a 
double  life — when  reticence  (if  it 
be  no  more  than  reticence)  is  the 
law  of  self-preservation. 
HI 
Oftener  than  not  a  boy's  lie  is 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES     17 

merely  a  poor  mean  hurried  de- 
fence thrown  up  to  protect  his 
menaced  ego.  (So  the  mollusc 
builds  a  shell  round  its  soft  body.) 
It  is  a  natural  process.  (So  the 
cephalopodian  cuttle-fish  darkens 
the  water  with  sepia  dye  and  hides 
from  danger  in  the  darkness.) 
It  is  a  way  that  nature  has. 

And  the  boy's  lie  is  not  only 
natural;  it  is  almost  instinctive. 
It  is — to  his  immature  judgment 
— the  readiest  way  of  defending  his 
individuality.  The  question  is 
not  one  of  morals;  at  this  point  it 
hardly  enters  the  realm  of  ethical 
discussion.  In  the  beginning  it  is 
an  instinctive  need  of  self-protec- 
tion that  makes  the  new-born  man 


i8  THE  EGO  BOOK 

shell  himself  over  with  a  calcareous 
covering  of  deception,  reticence, 
falsehood ;  and  safe  inside  the  shell 
his  ego  grows  and  fattens  like  an 
oyster. 

I  do  not  say  this  is  a  good  thing; 
I  say  distinctly  it  is  a  bad  and 
calamitous  thing;  but  it  is  not  the 
fault  of  the  oyster — or  the  new-born 
man.  The  oyster,  one  might 
fancy,  would  prefer  to  swim  his 
wet  world  joyously  naked  in  an 
opalescent  skin;  and  the  new-bom 
man  had  rather  keep  his  first, 
frank,  forthcoming,  unhesitating 
courage ;  but  if  the  oyster  is  to  live, 
it  must  have  the  protection  of  a 
shell,  and  the  young  ego — if  it  is  to 
survive — ^must    have    a    fortress. 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES     19 

There  are,  to  be  sure,  instances 
where  a  new-bom  man  has  come 
into  an  environment  so  sym- 
pathetic that  he  has  no  need  for 
burrow  or  tower.  I  think  these 
instances  are  rarer  than  is  usually 
thought.  The  new-bom  man  may 
find  love,  devotion,  adoration,  but 
find,  none  the  less,  that  his  indi- 
viduality— the  one  thing  which 
permits  him  to  say  "I  am" — is 
attacked  at  every  point. 

Have  sympathy  for  your  broth- 
er, the  oyster!  And  sympathy 
for  the  soft-shelled  ego  that  has 
come  into  your  house ! 

It  is  possible  that  you  are  a 
professor  of  homiletics;  that  to-day 
you    walk    the    moral    law    with 


20  THE  EGO  BOOK 

undeviating  precision  as  a  circus- 
maiden  wa'ks  the  tight-rope;  but 
if  you  will  look  back  into  your 
boyhood  you  will  find  it  full  of 
burrows  and  fortresses  and  dark, 
hollow  places,  where  you  and  the 
Lie  crouched  together  in  hiding. 

What  else  could  you  do?  Think 
it  over.  And  what  other  thing 
can  the  new-breeched  man  in 
your  nursery  do?  (Granted,  of 
coiu"se,  that  his  ego  is  menaced.) 
The  boy  is  right  to  build  a  fortress 
even  if  (unhappily)  he  has  to  build 
it  out  of  deceits  and  sham  and 
falsehood. 

And  now  of  two  things  one  will 
happen:  Either  —  when  he  is 
strong  enough,  when  his  ego  has 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES     21 

affirmed  itself — he  will  walk  out 
and  leave  the  walls  behind;  or, 
tragically,  he  will  find  that  he 
can't  get  out.  The  first  is  the 
normal  boy;  he  is  the  kind  of  a 
boy  that  you  were  and  that  your 
father  was  and  that  your  son  will 
be;  but  for  the  moment  my  interest 
is  with  that  other  wretched  boy 
whose  tower  has  become  a  prison. 
What  he  forgot  was  that  the  most 
important  architectural  featvire  of 
every  stronghold  is — the  draw- 
bridge. He  has  left  only  a  barred 
window  to  peer  out  through;  a 
window  through  which  the  casual 
passer-by  may  throw  stones  and 
flints  at  his  pallid  and  dirty  face. 
He  is  the  eternal  victim  of  nature 


22  THE  EGO  BOOK 

and  of  life,  exile  from  happiness, 
the  world's  grim  example  of  neces- 
sary reprisal. 

One  way  or  the  other;  of  these 
two  ways  one;  yet  even  that 
prisoner  of  the  lie  I  shall  not 
wholly  blame — it  was  his  melan- 
choly destiny  not  to  be  well  bom. 

IV 

There  is  nothing  so  tragic,  I 
think,  as  this  first  adventure  in 
life  of  the  young  ego  striving  to 
find  itself  and  attempting  to 
establish  itself  on  fair  terms  in  an 
alien  and  unfamiliar  environment. 

Do  you  know  that  children  have 
committed  suicide? 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES     23 

Not  hundreds  but  thousands 
of  them. 

And  for  what  seemed  tiny 
causes,  ridiculous,  ephemeral,  mak- 
ing for  laughter. 

Always  behind  the  childish  rea- 
sons is  one  implacable  and  com- 
pelling reason,  and  what  it  is  you 
know.  The  new-bom  ego,  sensi- 
tive as  an  uncovered  nerve,  had 
been  pawed  and  bruised  and 
dirtied  until  (with  horror)  it  fled 
away  to  a  very  certain  refuge.  I 
know  a  distinguished  German 
scholar  who,  when  he  was  ten 
years  of  age,  tried  to  kill  himself 
with  a  pistol-shot. 

"Why,  in  reason's  name,  did 
you  try  to  do  it?"  I  asked. 


24  THE  EGO  BOOK 

"Terror,"  he  replied,  "the  man 
inside  was  trying  to  nin  away  from 
life." 

It  was  not  that  love  was  lack- 
ing; he  was  bom  into  the  very 
warmth  and  shelter  and  lighted 
room  of  love;  what  was  lacking 
was  understanding  and  (put  it 
bluntly)  due  respect  for  an  ego 
which  was  essentially  his  own  and 
was  not  the  ego  of  any  other  per- 
son, even  though  that  person  were 
the  first-of-kin. 

These  thoughts,  and  others, 
came  to  me  as  I  stood  in  the 
railway  station  looking  at  the 
toothless  and  almost  bald  man 
who  lay,  wrapped  in  lace  and 
flannel,   in  an  old  woman's  lap. 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES     25 

When  my  train  was  called,  I  let 
it  go  away  to  the  mountains 
without  me. 

"Brother,"  I  said,  "that  new- 
bom  ego  of  yours  has  a  long 
pedigree.  The  quaint  scientist 
will  trace  it  back,  in  its  evolution, 
to  the  pale  protozoads  who  ex- 
changed their  paranucleary  sub- 
stance in  the  first  vague,  groping 
kiss.  (At  which  moment,  brother, 
love  was  bom — and  death.)  It  is 
a  long  evolution.  Down  through 
the  years  you  journeyed  acquiring, 
attaining,  perfecting  the  machine 
which  is  your  ego.  And,  brother, 
you  have  a  right  to  affirm  and 
maintain  it.  You  are  living  out  a 
life    the    curves    of    which    were 


26  THE  EGO  BCX)K 

plotted  far  back  in  the  dim  night 
of  evolution.  Millions  of  years 
went  to  your  making.  Go  your 
way;  for  if  you  are  to  survive  you 
must  go  your  own  way — and  the 
way  of  none  other. " 

At  this  picture  of  an  eternal  past 
and  a  menacing  future,  the  new- 
bom  man  howled  aloud.  I 
watched  him,  without  disapproval. 
In  a  little  while  he  became  strangely 
red  in  the  face  and  breathless. 
Then  silence.  Suddenly  a  look 
of  curious  intentness  came  over  his 
face,  as  though  he  were  listening  to 
a  ventriloquistic  voice.  He  had 
heard  the  voice  of  hunger.  He 
gave  a  fierce  yell,  which  even  the 
aged  and  wrinkled  woman  under- 


WHEN  THE  EGO  WAKES     27 

stood;  what  it  said  was:  "I  am 
I— feed  me!" 

It  was  a  plain  and  precise 
statement. 

"Feed  me" — but  there  was  no 
food,  of  the  kind  he  Hked,  to  be 
had;  the  old,  old  nurse  did  not 
have  any  (and  I  did  not  have 
any). 

From  a  black  silk  bag  she  took 
out  a  hollow  ivory  ball  filled  with 
pebbles  or  shot,  and  attached  to  a 
short  ivory  handle ;  and  she  rattled 
it  in  his  face. 

It  was  a  moment  before  he 
realized  the  full  infamy  of  the 
proceedings — that  he  who  had 
demanded  a  special  kind  of  food 
should  be  mocked  by  the  rattling 


28  THE  EGO  BOOK 

of  an  ivory  ball  with  pebbles  in  it ! 
His  wrath  roared  aloud. 

"Howl  on,  O  new-bom  man,"  I 
said,  "she  is  not  the  only  woman 
who  will  deceive  you!" 

And  I  went  away. 


Qiapter  11 

How  to  Protect  Yourself  in  the  Family 

I 

YOU  were  bom,  I  happen  to 
know,  in  a  family.  There 
are  few  exceptions.  It  is 
one  of  those  universal  and  inex- 
tricable situations  for  which  the 
popiilar  imagination  has  found  an 
apt  expression: 

De  quelque  cote  que  je  me  tourne  Je 
vols  la  ville  de  Lihourne. 

And  the  family — it  is  your  town 

of  Libourne;  and  mine.     You  are 
29 


30  THE  EGO  BOOK 

bom  in  it  and,  turn  as  you  will, 
it  confronts  you.  The  most  tre- 
mendous moment  in  life  is 
when  the  ego  wakes  and  looks 
about  and  sees  tall  people  standing 
round  it,  as  trees  stand  round  the 
house.  Who  are  these  people? 
Why  are  they  here?  And  how 
came  he,  the  new-fledged  ego, 
among  them?  I  believe  that  every 
boy  has  lived  in  this  mystery  and 
asked  himself  these  questions. 
There  is  a  tall  man  there  whom 
he  does  not  know,  whom,  indeed, 
he  can  with  difficulty  know  until  he 
is  himself  a  man.  There  is  a  tall 
woman  there  who  stoops  to  him 
and  captures  by  cajolery  his  earli- 
est attention.     Amazing  things  he 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    31 

thinks  of  her,  for  she  is  the  first 
idol  as  she  is  the  last. 

You  do  not  expect  me  to  attack 
this  idol.  Toucher  a  la  mere,  y 
pense-tu? — that  is  a  sacrilege  un- 
committed in  the  ages;  and  wo 
unto  him  by  whom  it  shall  come; 
but  it  is  well  to  see  these  tall  people 
of  the  household  as  the  young  and 
bewildered  stranger  in  the  house 
sees  them.  The  father's  attack 
upon  his  individuality  is  due  to 
that  dreadful  intellectual  vanity 
which  would  fain  see  his  son's 
mind  bent  as  his  own  is  bent.  It 
is  natural,  as  has  been  said,  for  few 
men  can  conceive  of  an  intellect 
better  than  their  own.  And  it 
is  nattiral  that  the  attorney  should 


32  THE  EGO  BOOK 

see  in  his  son  an  immature  but 
promising  attorney — as  the  wolf 
sees  a  wolf  in  his  cub.  Happily 
for  the  boy  it  is  only  at  odd  times 
that  the  father  makes  an  attack 
upon  his  nascent  individuality — 
only  now  and  then  when  the  more 
immediate  cares  of  the  day  are  put 
away.  But  the  mother  is  unfail- 
ing and  unresting  in  the  attack. 
By  bribes  and  by  threats,  by  kisses 
and  laughter  and  abysmal  self- 
sacrifice  she  captures  him.  She 
storms  the  stronghold  of  his  being 
as  Cossacks  storm  a  town.  Even 
his  love — his  beautiful  instinctive 
filial  love — is  not  free  love;  it  is 
chained  in  caresses  and  tied  up  in 
menaces  and  bribed  with  comfits. 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF     33 

And  to  gain  liberty  to  be  himself 
(often)  the  son  must  be  a  bad  son. 
Until  he  knows — that  is,  until  he 
learns  how  to  protect  himself  in 
the  family  into  which  he  has 
fallen. 

There  were  (I  remember)  other 
strangers  in  your  family.  One 
of  them  was  a  girl  with  a  lot  of 
brown  hair  on  her  head  and  eyes 
the  color  of  a  bee.  She  was 
young  for  a  girl  and  slim.  One 
of  your  earliest  and  most  awfiil 
memories  is  of  being  danced  on  her 
sharp  knees.  She  was  one  of 
your  most  fearsome  enemies.  No 
one,  it  seemed,  could  invent  more 
ways  of  showing  disrespect  for 
your  ego.    Her  kisses  were  given 


34  THE  EGO  BOOK 

in  a  way  that  made  them  a  daily 
and  public  humiliation.  You  had 
rather  been  the  pet  of  a  python. 
The  boy  you  found  in  the  house 
when  you  got  there  was  more 
easily  tolerated.  He  was  only  a 
few  years  older  than  you  were 
and  the  warfare  was  waged  on 
more  equal  terms.  You  seemed  to 
have  an  instinctive  knowledge  of 
his  plan  of  attack.  And  one  day 
— that  was  the  beginning  of  strange 
things — you  were  able  to  foretell 
exactly  how  he  was  planning  to 
make  a  breach  in  your  wall  of 
defense.  It  was  as  though  your 
thought  had  jumped  with  his; 
it  was  more — it  was  as  though  you 
were  inside  his  skin,  sitting  there 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF     35 

with  him  like  a  twin,  and  hear- 
ing him  think.  It  was  the  most 
amazing  thing!  For  the  adven- 
ture went  far;  you  discovered  that 
he  was  not  merely  a  red-headed, 
tweed-breeched  ruffian  of  an 
enemy  named  Rufus;  you  dis- 
covered, as  well,  that  inside  him 
was  an  ego — not  exactly  like 
yours,  not  as  interesting  as  yours, 
but,  at  all  events,  a  distinct  and 
recognizable  ego. 

You  gasped ;  and  the  shock  of  it 
— or  Rufus — knocked  you  off  the 
garden  wall. 

II 

That  was  a  memorable  day.  It 
was  a  greater  day  than  that  upon 


36  THE  EGO  BOOK 

which  the  ego  woke  and  said: 
"I  am  I — feed  me!"  It  was  the 
day  of  all  days.  It  was  the  day 
the  ego  first  recognized  it  was  not 
walking  the  world  alone.  If  I  re- 
member rightly,  you  thrilled  with 
a  finer  joy  than  any  joy  that  man 
may  know — save  one.  (Of  that 
joy  there  shall  be  word  hereafter.) 

For  a  while  you  lay  on  the 
lawn  where  you  had  fallen  from 
the  wall.  The  breath  had  been 
bumped  out  of  you,  but  when  it 
came  back  you  made  use  of  it  to 
shout:  "HilRufus!" 

Rufus  had  gone. 

You  lay  on  your  back  and  stared 
up  at  the  tree-tops.  They  were 
whispering  in  the  wind,  but  they 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    37 

said  nothing  to  you.  Nature 
never  says  anything  to  a  child.  To 
read  its  message  one  must  look  at 
it  with  eyes  already  old.  But  you 
lay  there  and  stared  at  the  tree- 
tops  while  swift  waves  of  exulta- 
tion coursed  through  you  from 
heel  to  hair. 

*  *  Philemon ,  Philemon ! "  you 
said  to  yourself — you  were  named 
Philemon  after  a  tall  person  with  a 
cleft  chin  and  a  long  purse,  who 
had  come  into  your  family  dis- 
guised as  an  uncle,  "Philemon — 
it  was  all  a  mistake — you  are  not 
alone  in  a  world  of  moving,  mouth- 
ing, eating,  kissing  shadows — hid 
in  these  strange  enemies  are  other 
egos,   ctiriously   like  yo\ir  own." 


38  THE  EGO  BOOK 

And  you  stood  up  and  walked 
abroad;  young,  strong,  audacious, 
you  walked  the  earth,  haughtily — 
as  though  you  had  secret  and 
formidable  allies  ever3rwhere.  And 
indeed  you  had. 

You  were  no  such  temerarious 
fool  as  to  put  your  Discovery  to 
the  test  without  due  preparation. 
You  were  a  cautious  Philemon. 
For  days  you  went  round  Rufus, 
looking  for  an  opening — soft-foot- 
ed as  a  wolf  goes  round  a  sheep- 
fold.  That  ruffian  had  every  gate 
locked.  And  then  one  day  (it 
was  in  a  rather  dangerous  and 
mysterious  place  at  the  foot  of  the 
lawn  near  a  menacing  hedge)  you 
found  the  slim  girl — all  hair  and 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    39 

teeth  and  eyes  and  beauty,  like 
a  cat — curled  up  in  the  shade, 
reading  or  pretending  to  read 
(for  you  were  never  quite  sure  of 
her)  in  a  book.  Her  name  was 
Kathryn  and  she  had  the  part  of 
sister  in  the  family  you  came  into. 
Practically  you  knew  nothing  of 
her,  except  that  she  was  a  hard 
and  dangerous  enemy — the  one 
vulnerable  point  you  had  found  was 
to  call  her  "Kat, "  which  seemed 
to  draw  blood. 

You  sat  down  three  feet  away 
from  her  and  looked  at  her.  What 
she  would  do  you  did  not  know — 
the  distance  of  three  feet  meant 
some  sort  of  safety;  but  you 
hoped,    with    a    strangely    eager 


40  THE  EGO  BOOK 

hope,  that  her  ego  would  slip  out  of 
her  and  come  and  have  a  talk  with 
you. 

"Kathryn, "  you  said;  that 
meant  you  were  on  a  peaceful 
mission;  it  was  unusual  and  at- 
tracted her  attention;  she  glanced 
up  wonderingly  from  her  book 
and  put  the  hair  out  of  her  eyes. 

"Well?"  she  asked. 

You  wanted  to  tell  her  about 
your  Discovery. 

"Kathryn,  I've  found  out  some- 
thing," you  said;  "Rufus  isn't 
just  a  boy." 

"I  know  he  isn't,"  Kathryn 
calmly  replied;  "he's  a  little  red- 
headed beast." 

You    were    grieved;    you    felt 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    41 

sorry  for  Kathryn;  she  seemed 
pathetically  young — that  was  the 
way  you  used  to  talk  before  you 
made  the  Discovery.  You  looked 
at  her  sadly ;  and  you  saw  that  she 
was  watching  you  with  eyes  the 
color  of  a  bee — indeed  the  color 
of  two  bees. 

"What's  the  matter,  Phil?" 
Phil  was  a  peace-word ;  her  way 
of  insulting  you  was  to  call  you 
Filly. 

And  you  told  her  of  your  Dis- 
covery. It  was  hard  to  tell.  At 
first  she  seemed  to  think  there  was 
a  Mad  Boy  in  the  family.  But 
after  a  while,  when  you  told  her 
how  you  and  Ruf us  were  sitting  on 
the  wall  and  (while  you  were  fore- 


42  THE  EGO  BOOK 

casting  trouble)  you  had  somehow 
or  other  peeped  inside  Rufus  and 
discovered — to  your  amazement! 
— that  there  was  another  fellow 
inside  Rufus  very  much  like  your- 
self;  it  had  made  you  feel  "aw'fiy  " 
good;  and  you  wondered  whether 
there  was  anyone  inside  her — and 
wotdd  she  tell  you. 

Very  quiet  there  in  the  mysteri- 
ous shadow  of  the  hedge,  you 
remember;  and  Kathryn  looking 
at  you  with  eyes  that  were  mysteri- 
ous too,  but  bright;  and  she  said: 
*'Why,  Phil,  you  are  grown  up.'* 

Out  of  a  sagacity,  old  as  the  life 
of  the  planet,  you  answered:  "I 
always  was." 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    43 
III 

*Twas  a  shy  queer  game  you 
played  with  Kathryn.  Hers  was 
not  so  accessible,  so  courteous,  and 
forthcoming  an  ego  as  your  own. 
It  would  dart  out  like  a  sun-lizard, 
show  you  its  shifting,  flashing 
colors  for  a  moment  and  then 
dart  back  again.  You'd  stare  with 
astonishment  and  find  there  was 
nothing  but  Kat  there.  Of  course 
that  was  not  so  bad  now,  for  you 
could  put  up  with  a  good  deal  of 
Kat,  knowing  all  the  while  there 
was  a  secret  and  shining  ally  inside. 

Rufus  was  a  harder  fortress  to 
take.  That  extraordinary  boy 
seemed  to  have  been  bom  without 


44  THE  EGO  BOOK 

a  drawbridge.  And  he  was  a 
remarkable  strategist.  He  seemed 
to  know  in  some  Napoleonic  way 
just  where  you  and  Kathrynwere 
trying  to  drive  a  mine  under  his 
fortifications;  and  bang — ^he  had 
you  countermined  like  that !  One 
day  you  got  him.  (That  is  Ru- 
fus's  story;  it  wouldn't  be  fair 
to  print  it  in  a  book — and  he 
black-robed  and  sitting  now  on  a 
judicial  bench!)  But  you  cer- 
tainly got  him;  you  and  Kathryn; 
and  when  he  did  come  out  you 
found  that  the  man  inside  wasn't 
at  all  like  the  truculent,  red- 
headed tyrant  who  passed  in  yoxir 
family  for  a  brother.  He  was  a  com- 
panionable fellow  and  a  valuable 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF     45 

ally.  What  was  oddest  was  that 
he  had  had  remarkable  experiences 
which  had  never  come  in  your  way 
nor  in  Kathryn's.  For  one  thing 
he  did  not  believe  in  abstract 
ideas.  He  said  there  was  no  such 
thing  as  an  abstract  idea. 

And  Kathryn  asked:  "What 
about  duty?" 

"Duty,"  said  Rufus,  "isn't  one 
thing — it  is  a  lot  of  things.  It's 
your  duty  to  go  to  school  and  to 
scrub  the  back  of  your  neck  and  to 
fold  up  your  clothes  at  night  and 
run  a  thread  between  your  teeth 
and  say  'Thank  you'  and  'Please' — 
each  one  is  a  duty,  but  there  isn't 
any  such  thing  as  Duty.  If  there  is, 
why  don't  it  come  round  here  and 


46  THE  EGO  BOOK 

let  us  have  a  look  at  it.  Every- 
thing can  either  walk  or  fly  or 
swim  or  lie  still  like  a  stone  and 
you  can  see  it — or  sit  on  it — and 
know  it  is  there. " 

That  was  the  way  the  man 
inside  Rufus  used  to  go  on;  you 
and  Kathryn  did  not  agree  with 
him — especially  Kathryn,  who 
said  the  Noblest  Object  of  Ador- 
ation was  an  abstract  idea — but 
you  liked  to  hear  him  talk.  He 
knew  things  you  had  never  known 
— or  perhaps  had  forgotten. 

It  was  a  splendid  thing,  this 
discovery  of  allies  hidden  in  the 
two  young  brawling  enemies  who 
were  living  in  your  house.  And 
the  best  of  it  was  that  even  Rufus 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    47 

admitted  there  was  a  man  inside 
him  and  began  to  take  a  sort  of 
pride  in  letting  him  out  now  and 
then  for  an  airing.  Of  course  he 
only  did  this  when  the  two  tall 
strangers  in  your  family  were  not 
about. 

Looking  back  upon  it  now  it 
seems  to  you  almost  miraculous 
that  you  should  have  ever  made 
their  acquaintance  at  all.  They 
stood  so  high  they  breathed  a 
different  layer  of  the  atmosphere, 
and  when  they  stooped  it  was  as 
though  tall  poplars  had  leaned 
down  to  say  something  to  the 
grass. 

The  hardest  thing  on  earth  is 
to  know  a  person  who  is  not  of 


48  THE  EGO  BOOK 

your  own  generation.  I  have  a 
friend  (if  you  will  pardon  me  for 
thrusting  myself  into  this  chapter 
which  belongs  to  you)  who,  when 
first  I  knew  him,  was  a  boy.  At 
least  the  body  he  walked  the  world 
in  was  that  of  a  boy.  For  a  year 
or  so  I  had  not  seen  him.  One  day 
he  came  into  my  study  and  held 
out  his  hand — you  would  have 
said  he  was  still  a  boy,  but  I  knew 
at  once  he  had  jiimped  the  barrier 
that  had  divided  his  generation 
from  mine;  to-day  our  egos  eye 
each  other  with  perfect  confidence. 
Now  the  generation  that  stands 
just  above  a  child  is — in  some 
crushing  way — the  most  difficult 
of  comprehension.     Even  the  gen- 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    49 

eration  above  it  seems  more  un- 
derstandable. A  boy  will  get  to 
know  —  for  example — his  grand- 
father and  that  good  man's  ego, 
long  before  he  comes  upon  speak- 
ing terms  with  the  ego  of  his  own 
father.  It  is  curious;  and  there 
must  be  some  law  in  it,  as  there  is 
in  everything  else;  it  appears  in 
the  flimsiest  fashion  of  the  day  as 
well  as  in  hviman  relations.  An 
illustration: 

There  was  given  recently  in  a 
notorious  city — a  city  without 
myth  or  mystery — an  exhibition 
of  what  was  called  Bad  Taste. 
What  it  really  was  was  an  exhi- 
bition of  sinister  and  profound  vul- 
garity, for  the  Bad  Taste  it  jeered 


50  THE  EGO  BOOK 

at  was  that  of  the  generation  just 
above — of  the  mother  and  the 
father.  And  yet  I  saw  in  it  the 
working  of  that  mysterious  law  to 
which  I  have  just  drawn  your 
attention.  For — note  this — bad 
taste  is  invariably  the  taste  of  the 
generation  immediately  preceding 
our  own.  The  bad  taste  of  the 
time  of  Shakespeare  was  Spenser; 
that  of  Pope's  day  was  Shake- 
speare; that  of  Wordsworth's  time 
was  Pope.  And  to  the  next  gene- 
ration all  that  is  beautiful  for  us 
will  seem  hideous — all  that  for  us 
is  gracious  will  seem  ridiculous — all 
that  is  rich  poor.  Our  delicious 
boudoirs,  our  charming  drawing- 
rooms,  our  ravishing  costumes,  our 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    51 

thrilling  dramas,  our  interesting 
books  (perhaps  even  this  one!), 
our  Vart  moderne — oh,  oh,  how 
they  will  be  stuffed  away  into 
garrets,  pulped  into  paper,  mere 
shot  rubbish  given  to  the  tides. 
It  is  part  of  that  queer  law.  That 
a  little  later  our  grandchildren — 
jeering  at  the  taste  of  their  fathers 
— will  take  it  down  from  the  garret 
and  worship  it  again  is  our  only 
consolation. 

There  is  no  bad  taste  except 
the  taste  of  the  generation  immedi- 
ately preceding  our  own;  grand- 
father's clock  is  all  right ;  it  is  only 
father's  clock  that  is  the  scorn  and 
derision  of  youth. 

A  law — Therefore  is  it  that  the 


52  THE  EGO  BOOK 

egos  dwelling  in  a  family  as  boy 
and  girl  and  boy  find  it  hardest 
of  all  to  get  on  terms  of  intimacy 
with  the  father  and  mother  of  the 
house. 

Since  I  have  already  told  so 
much  about  your  family,  you  do 
not  mind — do  you? — my  telling 
a  little  more.  The  tall  man, 
whose  r61e  was  that  of  father  in 
your  family,  had  a  thin,  pale  face, 
made  fine  by  the  habit  of  thought. 
His  eyes  were  gray  and  he  had 
(then)  short,  thick,  brown  hair 
brushed  back  from  his  forehead. 
He  wore  gold  reading-glasses 
which  gave  him  an  air  of  being 
foreign  and  occult.  For  years 
you  stalked  his  ego,  lying  in  wait 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    53 

for  it  at  every  turn  of  his  thought. 
Between  you  and  him  was  the 
opaque  glass  shield  which  divides 
generation  from  generation.  You 
will  remember  it  was  Kathryn 
who  broke  the  glass,  but  that  is 
her  own  story — ^her  own  grievous, 
tragic  story — and  you  would  not 
like  me  to  tell  it  here  though  the 
telling  cannot  hurt  her  any  more 
— forever.  Behind  the  shattered 
glass  you  found  a  man  sitting;  and 
the  man  within  looked  out  and  saw 
you;  and  you  knew  each  other — 
miraculously,  in  the  darkness  and 
fierce  sorrow  of  that  hour,  the  man 
within  the  father  knew  the  man 
within  the  son. 

You   have    often    told,  me,   in 


54  THE  EGO  BOOK 

quiet  hours,  how  the  last  idol 
fell — the  first  and  last  idol,  which 
is  the  Mother.  One  cannot  love 
an  idol.  One  may  worship  it; 
and  in  worship  there  is  something 
of  the  unknown — one  worships 
only  the  aloof  and  the  far-away. 
That  you  loved  her  seemed  to  be 
the  first  thing  that  beat  in  upon 
your  awakened  consciousness;  but 
it  was  a  love  that  went  in  chains 
and  fattened  on  bribes  and  sacri- 
fices and  habits.  You  loved  your 
idol.  You  would  have  thrown 
yourself  beneath  the  crushing 
wheels  it  was  carried  abroad  on. 
You  loved  your  idol;  but  it  was 
unknown  and  mysterious — stand- 
ing up  high  among  the  clouds  of  an 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    55 

upper  generation.  But  the  gate- 
way to  that  temple — the  door 
of  that  ego — ^you  opened  at  last. 
All  brave  and  beautiful  deeds  are 
simple.  You  did  it  quite  simply. 
I  remember  the  very  words  in 
which  you  described  it:  "I  just  let 
down  my  drawbridge  and  stepped 
out  and  stood  quite  still  where  she 
could  see  me.  She  was  sitting 
by  the  window  in  the  twilight;  I 
could  see  her  face — it  was  like  a 
cameo  against  the  fading  copper 
of  the  sky.  She  turned  and 
looked  at  me — " 

And  the  rest  is  your  story  and 
your  secret ;  and  hers. 


56  THE  EGO  BOOK 

IV 

I  do  not  know  whether  I  have 
made  quite  clear  your  adventures 
in  the  family  into  which  you  were 
bom,  so  that  others  may  profit  by 
them.  To  me  it  seems  very  clear. 
You  learned  how  to  protect  your- 
self in  your  family  by  making 
allies,  first  of  one  and  then  of  all. 
You  made  yoiur  fortress  impreg- 
nable by  letting  down  the  draw- 
bridge and  taking  the  warders 
away  from  the  gate.  You  made 
the  man  inside  you  invincible  by 
letting  him  go  forth,  naked  and 
without  weapons. 

Your  secret  was  a  simple  one. 
Magnificent    as    your    Discovery 


TO  PROTECT  YOURSELF    57 

was,  it  was  simple,  too — that  within 
the  strangers,  who  dwelt  in  your 
house,  Itirked  egos  like  your  own, 
shining  and  forthcoming  and  cou- 
rageous.    That  was  all. 


Qiapter  m 

How  to  Get  the  Better  of  Yoor  Friencis 
and  Enemies 


rERE  is  only  one  way  to 
get  the  better  of  a  man, 
and  that  is  to  understand 
him  better  than  he  does  you. 

It  does  not  matter  whether  that 
man  is  friend  or  enemy — indeed 
the  difference  between  them  is  not 
antithetical.  Both  are  men  who 
are  interested  in  you  and  in  whom 
you  take  an  interest.  I  am  not 
siire  that  the  interest  of  the  enemy 

58 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    59 

is  not  more  unflagging  than  that  of 
the  friend.  He,  in  his  sound,  in- 
veterate way,  will  lie  awake  nights 
thinking  about  you,  while  your 
best  friend  falls  indifferently 
asleep  and  dreams  of  some  girl 
who  is  touring  the  continent.  An 
attraction  equal  in  power — if  it  be 
not  the  same  in  quality — keeps 
them  swinging  round  and  round 
in  the  orbit  of  your  life.  That  is 
why  I  have  put  them  both  into 
one  chapter — enemies  and  friends 
together. 

I  would  not  have  you  think  I 
hold  friendship  lightly. 

Spiritual  philosophers  have  al- 
ways seen  something  sacred  in  it. 
There  are  in  the  Bible,  you  may 


60  THE  EGO  BOOK 

have  observed,  many  mysterious 
statements;  none,  I  think,  is  more 
mysterious  than  that  reference  to 
a  "faithful  friend,"  where  he  is 
called  medicamentum  vitcB  et  im- 
mortalitatis — as  though  in  friend- 
ship there  were  the  very  elixir  of 
life  and  immortality.  Now  the 
subtlest  of  modem  scientists — I 
have  named  Dr.  Baraduc — states 
precisely  the  same  thing,  though  in 
modish  scientific  language,  when  he 
says  that  friendship  between  you 
and  Kathryn — or  Rufus — is  due 
to  the  harmony  of  your  vibrations, 
and  that  these  vibrations  may  be 
measured  (with  perfect  exactitude) 
by  a  biometer. 

(You  did  not  know  Dr.  Bara- 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    6i 

due?  He  was  a  thaumaturgist. 
He  used  to  walk  the  sceptical 
boulevards  of  Paris  in  a  dusty 
black  coat  and  a  pot  hat  and  no 
one  recognized  in  the  dingy  scien- 
tist the  eternal  sorcerer.  Public 
opinion  is  easily  duped  by  a 
change  of  costume.  Because  the 
constellated  robe  is  gone  it  fancies 
there  are  no  necromancers  more. 
But  Dr.  Baraduc,  out  in  his  wind- 
blown house  in  Neuilly,  worked 
miracles,  juggling  with  gamma 
rays  and  alpha  rays  and  negative 
electrons,  as  the  Japanese  juggler 
plays  with  fans  and  lamps.  And 
above  all  he  measured — with  that 
fragile  biometer — the  vibrations 
of     human     vitality — whence     I 


62  THE  EGO  BOOK 

learned  what  friendship  is;  and 
enmity.  It  is  a  simple  thing, 
the  biometer.  There  is  a  Ruhm- 
korff  coil;  there  is  a  tiny  bronze 
needle  suspended  over  a  dial 
marked  out  with  360°.  Over  the 
instrument  is  a  glass  globe.  That 
is  all.  Now  place  your  left  hand 
near  it ;  the  needle  will  be  attracted 
and  will  swing  ten,  fifteen,  twenty 
degrees  round  the  circle,  pause 
there  for  a  given  number  of  seconds, 
and  return  to  its  place  at  a  certain 
rate  of  speed.  The  right  hand 
will  repulse  the  needle  to  some 
other  point  and  at  a  varying  speed. 
These  data  give  the  formula  of 
your  animal  vibrations;  they  are 
the  horizontal  forces.     Now  in  a 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    63 

similar  way  the  biometrist  would 
measure  the  diagonal  animic  vi- 
brations and  the  swifter  mental 
vibrations  of  the  vertical  forces. 
And  when  he  was  done  he  knew — 
believe  me — ^more  about  you  than 
if  he  had  walked  through  you  with 
a  lighted  candle  in  his  hand  and  a 
microscope  in  his  eye.  What  is 
significant  is  that  in  five  thousand 
observations  made  in  hospitals 
and  clinics  of  Paris  no  two  gave  an 
identical  formula.  But  there  were 
curious  likenesses.  And  when 
these  Hkenesses  exist — when  the 
vital  forces  in  Rufus  vibrate  in  fair 
harmony  with  yours — there  is  no 
power  of  circumstance  can  break 
yovir  friendship  or  pry  you  apart. 


64  THE  EGO  BOOK 

And  this  harmony,  if  it  be  sane, 
fortifies  itself.  It  acts,  as  was 
mysteriously  said,  as  an  elixir  of 
life.  Whence  friendship,  whence 
racial  sympathies,  and  many  other 
obscure  and  terrible  forces.) 
Friend  and  enemy 

While  the  white  cord  that  binds 
my  friend  to  me  is  strong — far- 
reaching  back  to  other  stages  of 
evolution,  it  may  be — no  less 
binding  is  the  black  cord  that  ties 
me  fast  to  my  enemy  and  him  to 
me.  Hate  is  only  love  a  rehours. 
The  bronze  needle  over  the  dial 
swings   to   right   instead   of   left. 

Many  things  I  do  not  know:  I 
do  not  know  of  what  tree  man  is 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    65 

the  seed,  and  I  am  a  trifle  sceptical 
in  regard  to  the  objective  universe; 
but  one  thing  I  know:  My  friend 
and  I  and  my  enemy  are  as  insepa- 
rable as  the  three  sides  of  the 
prism.  And  it  is  a  question 
whether  Omnipotence,  laboring 
through  eternity,  could  divide  us, 
one  from  the  other  twain. 
And  this  is  mysterious. 

II 

It  is  one  of  my  Good  Intentions 
to  give  a  practical  method  of  get- 
ting the  better  of  friend  and  foe, 
but  if  you  will  permit  me  to  wanton 
by  the  way,  I  should  like  to  call 
back  to  your  memory,  my  dear 
Philemon,  a  friend  of  your  long  ago. 


66  THE  EGO  BOOK 

Yours  was  an  unexpected  friend- 
ship. It  certainly  had  not  been 
announced  by  the  Sibyls.  You 
met  in  the  days  of  youth,  but  you 
headed  him  by  two  years.  He  had 
pale  hair  and  blue  eyes  and  a 
gentle  nature.  It  may  be  truth- 
fully said  that  all  the  good  in  his 
soul  he  received  from  your  mouth. 
(This  statement  might  be  illus- 
trated by  the  picture  of  a  night- 
hawk  feeding  its  young;  for  so  he 
gaped  and  so  you  stuffed  his 
maw.)  You  lit  his  dim  ego  at  the 
lamp  of  yours.  You  carried  him 
on  your  shoulder.  And  as  you 
grew  yourself  (the  picture  now  is  of 
Milo  carrying  the  calf),  you  lifted 
him  higher  and  higher  from  the 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    67 

dust  and  infinite  conmionness  of 
the  street.  Always  you  will  stoop 
from  the  weight  of  him — so  long 
you  carried  him  on  your  neck. 
Year  after  year  you  held  him  up. 
Year  after  year  you  tried  to  waken 
his  ego  so  that  it  might  at  least 
whisper  "I  am  I."  And  you 
failed;  you  worked,  cried,  prayed, 
sobbed  for  him  for  long  and  pre- 
cious years;  and  you  failed.  High 
as  you  held  him  in  your  arms  he 
was  still  a  child  of  Nothing;  he 
was  still  a  flabby  twin  of  Insig- 
nificance— this  friend  of  whom 
you  had  hoped  to  make  a  Living, 
Loving,  Reciprocating  Man. 

Then,  in  despair,  you  laid  him 
gently  down  on  the  rug  and  held 


68  tHE  EGO  BOOK 

the  door  ajar.  Without  violence, 
without  indignation,  without  anger, 
without  a  vehement  gesture,  with 
exquisite  tact  and  smiling  sim- 
plicity you  said  to  him:  "Scat!" 

Cautiously  he  descended  the 
stairs,  as  though  he  were  carrying 
something  infinitely  rare  and  pre- 
cious— perhaps  a  fragment  of  the 
soul  you  had  given  him — and 
disappeared  in  the  commonness  of 
the  street. 

That  was  long  ago;  but  read 
here: 

Now  just  the  other  day  you  were 
sailing  with  a  prosperous  wind, 
for  a  certain  harbor.  Your  good 
ship,  Get-Rich-Quick,  was  laden 
to  the  ivlX  with  a  rich  and  valu- 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    69 

able  cargo.  Eight  bells  at  sea. 
Suddenly  the  look-out,  perched  on 
the  crojack  yard,  screamed  dole- 
fully, and,  as  you  rushed  forward, 
a  shot  raked  the  rigging.  In  a 
moment  a  dark,  sinister,  low-lying 
craft,  flying  the  black  flag  with 
skull  and  cross-bones,  bore  down 
on  you.  The  first  to  board  the 
Get-Rich-Quick  was  the  roaring 
captain,  a  hairy  pirate,  his  face 
black  with  powder  and  wrath,  a 
naked  cutlass  between  his  teeth. 

And  who  was  this  stark  and 
hairy  enemy? 

You  have  guessed;  he  was  no 
other  than  the  child  of  Nothing — 
the  flabby  twin  of  Insignificance. 

As  a  friend  he  was  a  heart-break- 


70  THE  EGO  BCX)K 

ing  failure;  but  as  an  enemy  he 
was  gloriously  trenchant  and  de- 
structive. You  would  fain  have 
had  word  with  him,  but  he  was 
too  busy  slaughtering  able  sailor- 
men,  bisecting  the  cabin-boy,  and 
looting  your  precious  cargo  of 
Utrecht  velvet,  Oriental  gems,  and 
Venetian  lace.  With  exquisite 
tact  you  leaped  overboard  and 
swam  for  yotu-  life.  A  few  mo- 
ments later  you  heard  the  explo- 
sion. Not  content  with  looting 
the  Get-Rich-Quick  the  hairy  ruf- 
fian had  blown  her  up — that  ship 
of  promise! — the  deserting  rats, 
the  bosun's  dog  and  all. 

What  you  had  to  think  over  was 
this:  In  place  of  a  poor,  feckless, 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    71 

inefficient  friend  you  had  gained  a 
thoroughly  effective  enemy.  And 
now  you  lie  awake  nights  thinking 
of  each  other;  you  were  never  so 
nearly  one — not  even  when  you 
carried  him  about  with  you  like  a 
cockchafer  in  a  pill-box.  But  bid 
the  stark  and  hairy  one  have 
patience.  There  has  been  a  way 
discovered  of  getting  the  better  of 
one's  enemies — and  friends. 

Ill 

The  way  is  this: 

Understand  your  friend  better 
than  he  does  you.  At  first  glance 
it  may  seem  difficult.  You  can't 
very  well  lead  him  into  Dr.  Bara- 
duc's  clinic  and  take  the  measure 


72  THE  EGO  BOOK 

of  his  vibrations,  animal,  animic, 
and  mental,  set  them  down  in  a 
chart,  and  deduce  his  formula. 
The  tamest  friend  wouldn't  stand 
for  that  without  tying.  Happily 
there  is  another  way.  John  Mur- 
dochamey  is  not  your  friend  save 
for  the  sufficient  reason  that  his 
vital  forces  travel  in  wave-lengths 
measurably  akin  to  your  own. 
Sandy  Mclngarack  is  your  enemy, 
not,  as  you  fancy,  because  he  is  an 
Ulsterman  and  the  devil  took  an 
interest  in  him  from  the  beginning, 
but  because  his  vital  currents  run 
counter  to  yours. 

The  good  Dr.  Baraduc  would 
tell  you  there  is  a  psychic  vitality 
as  well  as  a  physical  one.   Through 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    73 

the  latter  he  spied  on  your  physi- 
cal health — the  cleanliness  of  the 
blood  and  the  play  of  nerve  and 
muscle  and  the  decency  of  your 
flesh;  but  his  study  of  psychic 
vitality  led  him,  through  a  fairly 
well-lighted  corridor,  to  the  inner 
chamber  of  the  house,  where  your 
ego — perfected  in  the  long  years 
of  evolution — sits  up  and  takes 
notice. 

It  is  not  an  impossible  thing 
for  you  to  enter  the  house  of  your 
friend.  It  is  not  even  a  difficult 
thing.  Unless  you  were  swaying 
to  an  almost  identical  rh3rthm,  he 
had  not  been  your  friend.  Unless 
you  had  an  almost  uncanny  per- 
ception of  his  ways  of  thought, 


74  THE  EGO  BOOK 

you  had  never  found  yourself  in 
vibratory  sympathy  with  him. 

(One  of  your  friends,  you  say, 
is  your  exact  opposite.  It  comes 
to  the  same  thing.  There  is  as 
much  unity  between  a  positive 
electron  and  a  negative  one,  as 
between  two  parallel  lines.) 

You  put  it  as  clearly,  I  think,  as 
it  can  be  put:  The  Little  Gentle- 
man Inside  your  friend  is  an  ego 
appreciably  like  your  own.  Like 
and  yet  different.  In  order  to 
understand  his  ego  it  is  not  going 
to  help  you  much  to  lean,  like 
Narcissus,  over  your  own  life  and 
watch  its  current  of  joys,  hopes, 
fears,  desires,  prides,  loves,  hates, 
distresses.     What  you  have  got  to 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    75 

do  is  to  keep  your  eye  on  his  ego. 
You  must  try  and  think  in  his  way. 
When  you  were  climbing  the  Eiger- 
hom  and  checked  and  said:  "Jove! 
Murdochamey  would  enjoy  this 
sort  of  thing!"  you  had  already 
begun ;  you  were  taking  yoiu*  pleas- 
ure in  terms  of  Murdochamey. 
The  next  time  you  met  him  it  was 
easier  to  follow  that  sympathetic 
way  of  thinking.  And  while  that 
huge  fellow  sprawled  in  your 
library  chair  and  talked  without 
end,  you  fotmd  it  quite  possible  to 
foretell  the  foreward  trend  of  his 
thought.  It  is  what  anyone  can 
do  with  practice;  for,  while  he 
lounges  there  letting  his  thoughts 
go,  his  ego  has  let  down  the  draw- 


76  THE  EGO  BOOK 

bridge  and  stepped  out,  unafraid. 
And  the  thing  grows  on  you.  The 
practice  of  putting  yourself  in 
your  friend's  place — of  thinking  in 
terms  of  his  ego — brings  about  a 
very  peculiar  kind  of  sympathy; 
the  vibrations  get  into  closer  ac- 
cord; and  after  a  while  you  can 
forecaste,  with  the  exactitude  of  a 
barometer,  the  subtle  and  coming 
changes  of  his  mood,  of  which  he 
himself  is  not  yet  conscious.  It 
can  be  done.  It  is  done  every  day 
by  men  who  do  not  know  what 
they  are  doing,  but  who  are  able 
nevertheless  to  work  the  seeming 
miracle. 

It  is  an  old  rule,  but  indefecti- 
ble: Put  yourself  in  his  place.     If 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    77 

you  can  think  not  only  your 
own  thoughts  but  Murdochamey's 
thoughts,  as  well,  you've  got  him 
on  the  hip. 

And  you  will  cross-buttock  him 
and  break  his  neck? 

By  no  means;  for  to  understand 
Murdochamey  is  to  sympathize 
with  him — which  lets  the  draw- 
bridge down.  I  have  been  assum- 
ing that  you  love  Murdocharney. 
It  is  not,  perhaps,  a  lawless  as- 
sumption that  you  do  not  love  that 
wretched  man  of  Ulster,  Mclngar- 
ack.  (It  is  hard  to  adore  with 
equal  fervour  all  the  inhabitants 
of  the  planet — especially  those  of 
the  North  of  Ireland.)  Whether 
you  like  him  or  not,  he  is  the  third 


78  THE  EGO  BCX)K 

side  of  the  prism.  Only  in  one  way 
can  you  get  the  better  of  him: 
You  must  understand  him  better 
than  he  does  you. 

There  is  one  trouble  with  this 
thoroughly  practical  method  of 
treating  your  enemies. 

It  is  wasteful. 

I  speak  from  personal  experi- 
ence; whenever  I've  applied  it 
faithfully  and  well,  to  a  truculent 
and  satisfactory  enemy,  I've 
spoilt  him  for  all  practical  pur- 
poses of  enmity.  You  can't  slip 
into  the  fortress  of — well,  say  an 
Ulsterman,  and  sit  down  with  the 
Man  Inside,  without  acquiring  a 
kind  of  sympathy  with  his  enor- 
mous, destructive  ruffianism.    The 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    79 

stones  he  throws  are  smashing 
your  own  windows  and  he  is  firing 
your  hayricks;  but  you  find  your- 
self first  appreciating  his  skill  and 
then  feeling  sorry  when  he  misses. 
That  is  the  point  where  you  realize 
there  is  one  good  enemy  spoiled. 
You  have  begun  to  think  in  terms 
of  Mclngarack.  In  a  little  while 
you  are  able  not  only  to  think  as  he 
thinks,  but  you  can  think  a  min- 
ute ahead  of  him — and  then  you 
can  lead  him  into  camp. 

It  is  practical;  it  is  not  hard; 
but  as  I  have  said  it  is  wasteful — • 
it  is  a  wanton  destruction  of 
enemies.  For  you  cannot  know  a 
man — know  the  Man  Inside — and 
hate  him. 


8o  THE  EGO  B(X)K 

Have  you  read  Feltham?  He 
says:  "I  never  yet  knew  any  man 
so  bad,  but  some  have  thought 
him  honest;  and  afforded  him 
love.  Nor  ever  any  so  good,  but 
some  have  thought  him  vile,  and 
hated  him." 

It  was  all  a  matter  of  imder- 
standing.  If  a  man  will  but  set 
himself  to  it  he  can  come  to  an 
understanding  with  any  man — be 
he  roisterer,  bad  husband,  politi- 
cian or  Ulsterman;  for  every  man 
has  in  himself  a  little  of  the  rois- 
terer and  bad  husband,  a  little  of 
the  politician  and  more  or  less 
(God  help  us!)  of  the  Ulsterman. 

Being  a  nice-minded  man,  and 
honest,  you  refuse  to  be  on  terms 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    8i 

of  sympathetic  understanding  with 
yoiir  enemies?  You  look  with 
horror  upon  the  awful  possibility 
of  their  becoming  your  friends? 

I  sympathize  with  you;  but  it  is 
a  plain  matter  of  self -protection; 
it  is  the  only  way  to  get  the  best 
of  them. 

It  was  not  without  deep  reflec- 
tion that  I  called  that  splendid  and 
eternal  thing,  your  ego,  the  Little 
Gentleman  Inside.  He  is  indeed  a 
Gentleman  of  the  most  ancient 
lineage,  going  back  far  beyond  the 
metazoad  kiss  to  the  first  vague 
vortex  of  intra-atomic  energy  and 
to  a  Causa  Causans  more  mysteri- 


82  THE  EGO  BOOK 

ous  still.  This  sovereign  and  per- 
fect being  is  a  Gentleman  because 
he  does  always  (and  always  with 
simplicity)  exactly  what  he  ought 
to  do.  He  is,  I  repeat,  a  Gentle- 
man and  a  Gentleman  of  infinite 
age  and  an  upstanding  dignity, 
acquired  in  the  countless  years. 

Here  I  have  something  to  say, 
which  applies  even  to  the  Ameri- 
can civilization  in  which  these 
distinguished  egos,  bom  west  of 
the  Atlantic  Ocean,  are  now  living. 
What  I  first  have  in  mind  is  a 
thing  peculiarly  American.  This 
remark  applies  to  no  other  nation. 
(It  is  to  be  omitted  from  the  Ja- 
panese edition  of  this  book.) 

Thus,  then:  I  have  discovered 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    83 

the  most  significant  fact  concern- 
ing American  civilization.  It  is 
that  when  an  American  is  really 
fond  of  anyone  he  insults  him.  I 
do  not  merely  mean  that  he  calls 
him  "old  hoss"  and  "bo"  and  the 
like;  he  has  other  phrases  ("smile 
when  you  say  that ! ")  for  his  friend 
that  would  annoy  a  coal-heaver. 
What  I  do  mean  is  that  the  Gentle- 
man Inside  is  supposed  to  gather 
from  a  steady  stream  of  cold 
insolence  —  from  studied  and  or- 
nate insults — from  slangy  jests  that 
would  break  a  negro  prize-fighter's 
head — is  supposed  to  gather,  I 
repeat,  that  another  ego  of  equal 
antiquity  and  gentility  is  fond  of 
him.     If  that  other  ego  did  not 


84  THE  EGO  BOOK 

really  love  you,  he  would  treat  you 
with  perfect  propriety  and  respect. 
These  slangy  insults — this  rough 
kind  of  guying — are  the  homages 
he  pays  a  friend;  they  are  his  way 
of  asserting  a  cheery  and  intimate 
affection.  If  you  ask  him  why  he 
heaves  insults  at  his  friend,  he 
answers  heartily:  "The  dear  old 
swine,  why,  I  love  him,  dash  blank 
him" — and  he  curses  him,  with 
prodigious  and  unwearying  fervor. 
You  would  fancy  the  Distin- 
guished Gentleman  Inside  would 
shudder  at  this  sort  of  thing;  evi- 
dently he  takes  it  for  what  it  is — 
the  mere  rough  coltishness  of  an 
affection,  exuberant  but  untrained, 
which  knows  not  how  to  express 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    85 

itself  in  grave,  sweet  words.  He 
reads  it  aright.  He  knows  that 
this  insulting  bluster  hides  a  sin- 
cere, though  shame-faced,  love; 
but  the  stranger  gasps. 

There  is  one  thing  more — and 
stranger.  Like  every  other  ego  the 
ego  of  the  ordinary  man  is  a  Gentle- 
man, ancient  and  wise  and  grave. 
Now  when  he  goes  out  for  an  air- 
ing and  meets  friends  or  enemies 
— it  doesn't  matter  which — they 
tell  him  stories.  Little  anecdotes, 
either  roguish  or  vulgar.  Go  where 
he  will — into  a  club,  a  bar,  a  tent, 
an  office — he  is  confronted  by  a 
man  with  a  vulgar  little  anecdote. 

"Have  you  heard  the  one 
about " 


86  THE  EGO  BOOK 

Ever3rwhere.  Always.  From 
the  judge  in  his  robing-room  to  the 
scavenger  in  the  sewer,  each  has 
his  story.  And  the  stories  are 
generally  of  two  kinds ;  they  have 
to  do  with  women  or  with  shrewd 
bits  of  roguery. 

Children  love  little  tales — ^little 
dramatizations  of  life ;  and  there  is 
something  childlike  in  the  grown- 
up's delight  in  tawdry  bar-room 
fables.  In  those  I  have  heard 
there  is  almost  always  something 
cruel.  If  the  laughter  is  not  aimed 
at  the  splendor  and  honor  of 
woman,  it  is  pointed  at  someone 
who  has  been  cheated  (half  the 
stories  are  based  on  business  chi- 
canery), injured,  outraged,  made 


GET  THE  BETTER  OF  ONE    87 

a  victim  of  cleverness  or  a  butt 
of  cruel  strength.  Stories  of  the 
vulgar  side  of  love;  stories  of  comic 
pillage;  epigrams  of  grossness  and 
crime. 

What  intellectual  pabulum  is 
this  to  set  before  a  Gentleman  of 
long  descent — he  who  is  of  a  very- 
ancient  and  honorable  house — 
the  Gentleman  Inside? 

It  seems  to  me  that  when  one 
has  got  the  better  of  his  friends 
(and  foes)  a  very  pretty  reforma- 
tion would  be  to  treat  them  with 
fair  courtesy  in  the  first  place  and 
— in  the  second — to  pay  them  the 
compliment  of  assuming  that  they 
have  outgrown  the  stage  of  little 
foolish  boys  who  squat,  bartering 


88  THE  EGO  BOOK 

childish  absurdities,  in  the  stable 
mews. 

O,  my  anecdotal  brother,  respect 
the  Gentleman  Indoors! 


Chapter  IV 
How  the  Lover  Can  Protect  Himself 
I 

IT  was  not  last  year  or  the  year 
before ;  but  you  may  remember 
the  evening.  A  sHm  and  ardent 
young  man,  you  flamed  to  and  fro 
in  the  twilight  of  my  study,  talk- 
ing of  love.  I  did  not  look  upon 
you  as  a  pathological  case ;  I  look- 
ed upon  you  as  a  problem;  and 
with  wholesome  curiosity  I  asked: 
**How  does  it  feel,  Philemon,  to  be 
in  love?  "  And  you  answered  that 
89 


90  THE  EGO  BCM3K 

to  you  it  seemed  as  though  you 
were  occupying  the  centre  of  an 
emanation,  which  thrilled  and  bil- 
lowed on  every  side  of  you;  and 
you  said:  "It  is  love." 

"Your  diagnosis  is  doubtless 
correct,"  I  told  you,  "and  you  are 
indeed  in  love.  But  all  is  well. 
The  danger  is  negligible.  For  there 
is  a  difference  (it  is  vast  and  wide 
and  profoimd)  between  being  in 
love — and  loving  The  Woman. 
You,  as  you  have  so  well  described 
it,  are  the  centre  of  radiant  and 
forthgoing  emanations.  You  have 
defined  precisely  the  state  of  being 
in  love. 

"But,  Philemon,"  I  went  on, 
**it  is  not  the  same  thing  (for  it 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    91 

is  exactly  the  opposite  thing)  to 
love  The  Woman.  Then,  Phile- 
mon, the  thousand  and  one  fierce 
and  exultant  consciousnesses  which 
make  up  your  ego  will  march  all 
together,  like  a  crowd  to  a  festival, 
like  an  army  to  the  frontier;  and 
they  will  march  toward  Her  and 
toward  Her  alone.  That  is  what 
it  is  to  love  The  Woman — She  who 
is  ipsissima — She  whose  tense  in- 
dividuality of  vibration  is  for  you 
so  compelling  that  there  is  no 
other  point  of  attraction  in  all  the 
universe.  That  way  danger  lies. 
But  at  present,  I  take  it,  you  are 
safe.     You  are  merely  in  love. " 

Do  you  remember  that  evening? 
And  the  verses  you  read  me?     I 


92  THE  EGO  BOOK 

have  forgotten  the  verses,  but  I 
remember  the  advice  I  gave  you. 

I  continued:  "Being  in  love, 
Philemon,  never  hurt  anyone.  It 
even  gives  one  a  kind  of  exaltation, 
which  young  men — ^who  are  not 
so  highly  developed  as  you  are — 
often  mistake  for  genius;  whence 
the  rhymes  of  youth.  (Nightin- 
gales in  love  are  canorous;  with 
equal  obstinacy  but  with  less  dis- 
criminative judgment,  the  cat  in 
love  believes  he  has  a  singing 
voice.) " 

You  received  that  remark  with- 
out the  approbation  of  a  smile; 
and  I  went  on:  "Being  in  love 
never  hurt  anyone.  In  fact  so 
long  as  you  stand,  self-centred  at 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION     93 

the  very  heart  of  the  radiance,  you 
are  protecting  your  ego  in  a  mas- 
terly way.  No  dangerous  entity, 
silk-garmented,  long  of  hair  and 
hard  of  purpose,  can  force  the 
approaches  to  your  citadel.  Those 
rays  of  yours  are  all  pointed  out- 
ward— like  shining  spears,  tipped 
with  death.  Being  in  love,  O  son 
of  the  Quirites,  is  an  admirable 
protection  for  the  ego.  It  is  an 
armour  for  the  individual.  But 
if  ever  you  love  The  Woman — 

Her " 

And  there,  I  remember,  I 
stopped;  you  had  not  heard  me; 
you  were  not  listening;  the  man 
in  love  never  does  listen  to  any- 
one but  himself.     You  were  sing- 


94  THE  EGO  BOOK 

ing  the  lover's  litany  of  I — me — 
my.  He  who  loves  The  Woman 
is  a  different  kind  of  lover.  He  will 
listen  to  eternity,  if  your  talk  be 
of  love,  or  if  it  so  much  as  touch 
the  hem  of  Her  divinity. 

(I  like  that  kind  of  a  lover — the 
one-pointed  lover;  for  after  the 
pleasure  of  living  a  love-story 
there  is  none  greater  than  that  of 
talking  about  one.) 

Being  in  love,  then,  is  a  state  in 
which  there  is  no  peril  at  all.  It 
fortifies  the  ego  and  affirms  it. 
Blithely  the  Little  Gentleman  In- 
side sits  in  the  centre  of  his  radiant 
emanations  (as  you  called  them) 
and  twangs  a  guitar  and  sings 
songs  to  himself.     Songs  in  which 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    95 

girl's  names  rhyme  and  clink  like 
gilt  bangles.  All  harmless,  Phil- 
emon; it  never  did  anyone  any 
harm. 

II 

I  have  said — or  I  will  say — that 
man's  first  duty  is  to  protect  his 
ego. 

Man's  moral  point  of  departure 
is  egoism.  Egoism  is  the  senti- 
mental reflection  of  the  law  of 
existence,  by  which  the  being  tends 
to  persist  in  his  being.  The  danger- 
ous moment — for  man  as  for  meta- 
zoad — is  when  he  perceives  there 
are  other  beings  like  himself  and 
sacrifices  to  them  a  part  of  his  ego. 
There  is  danger  in  it;  with  man 


96  THE  EGO  BOOK 

as    with    metazoad    it    leads    to 
reproduction  or  to  death. 

And  when  is  it  death? 

Strangely  enough  it  is  death 
when  one  makes  the  sacrifice  of 
the  Ego  for  oneself.  It  is  life 
when  the  sacrifice  is  made  for 
others.  And  the  ego  thus  tends 
to  persist  in  other  beings.     ' 

And  this  is  quite  as  true  in 
morals  as  it  is  in  biology. 

It  is  true  in  love.  You  recall, 
perhaps,  Sallust's  brawling  ideal 
of  love:  Amare,  potavi?  Once  I 
quoted  this  to  Alfred  Henry  Lewis ; 
from  the  heights  of  serener  wisdom 
he  said:  "To  love  and  labor — 
nothing  else  is  worth  while.** 
Which  showed  a  complete  under- 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    97 

standing  of  the  law  of  existence. 
Love,  necessarily,  means  a  sac- 
rifice, greater  or  less,  of  the  ego; 
but  by  his  work  in  the  world  man 
may  make  good  the  quotidian  loss. 
Men  who  make  of  love  the  only 
purpose  of  their  lives  belong  to 
that  class  of  self-seeking  proto- 
zoads  who  exile  themselves  from 
life.  They  sacrifice  their  egos,  but 
it  is  a  barren  and  suicidal  sacrifice. 
These  are  usually  men  of  a  coarse 
type  and  it  is  difficult  to  make  it 
clear  to  them  that  their  kind  of 
love  should  not  dominate  a  life 
that  thinks.  That  type  of  man 
hardly  belongs  in  this  book;  for 
him  love  is  death — what  his  ego 
has  to  fear  is  not  absorption,  but 


98  THE  EGO  BOOK 

dispersion,  as  a  naked  worm 
dropped  into  an  ant-heap  is 
multitudinously  dispersed.  My 
thoughts  are  with  the  finer  man, 
the  superior  man,  whose  sacrifice 
is  fruitful.   For  him  there  is  danger. 

Without  irony  and  without  bit- 
terness, without  cynicism  and 
without  impudence,  tranquilly,  as 
one  recites  an  axiom  of  rectilinear 
geometry,  I  say:  "When  a  man 
loves  a  woman  he  stands  in  peril 
of  his  life  and  of  his  immortality; 
and  the  finer  the  man  the  greater 
is  his  peril. " 

I  do  not  mean  only  the  man  of 
genius;  to  him  woman  has  often 
been  nefast.  (It  would  be  all 
right  were  she  content  to  sit  and 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    99 

warm  herself  at  the  fire  of  his 
endeavor  and  toil  and  celebrity; 
but  she  will  insist  upon  toasting 
herrings  on  it.) 

Any  man  who  thinks  and  feels 
in  a  fine  way  stands  in  the  same 
danger.  And  the  danger  is  that 
she  will  tie  a  ribbon  (and  bell)  to 
his  ego.  Her  constancy,  her  devo- 
tion, her  abnegation  serve  only  to 
increase  his  dependence  upon  her; 
and  this  dependence  lessens  the 
man  and  limits  his  activities.  Her 
sentimental  happiness  increases  in 
proportion  to  what  he  gives  her  of 
himself — his  sacrifice  of  some  es- 
sential right  of  the  ego. 

Courage,  Philemon;  and  make 
fast    the    gate    of    your    citadel. 


100  THE  EGO  BOOK 

Things  would  go  much  better  in 
this  world  if  lovers  would  only 
remember  how  that  first  metazoad 
wasted  his  life  in  that  first  wild 
peranucleary  kiss — and  take  warn- 
ing. 

The  man  must  love  the  woman. 
The  peril  must  be  faced.  And 
there  is  only  one  way,  I  believe, 
in  which  a  man  may  sacrifice 
himself  and  yet  live.  I  shall  point 
out  the  way  and  name  a  man  who 
walked  therein. 

Ill 

And,  first,  as  Mrs.  Glasse  said 
in  the  immortal  cook-book,  catch 
your  hare. 

One  day  word  was  brought  to  me 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    loi 

that  Rufus  was  a  lover.  He  was 
not  a  lover  by  choice.  He  was  a 
lover  as  one  is  lion  or  shark  or 
earthquake  or  cataract,  simply  be- 
cause it  is  absolutely  indispensable 
to  be  the  thing  it  is  decreed  one 
shall  be,  and  no  other  thing.  But 
it  would  take  a  little  more  than 
the  language  of  man  to  express  how 
imperiously  the  Law  of  Things 
must  have  wished  this  especial 
man  to  be  a  lover,  for  everything 
in  him  cried  out  against  it.  Rufus 
was  not  bom  for  love.  He  was 
forced  into  it.  In  some  strange 
way  he  had  foreknowledge  of  its 
coming,  as  cattle  scent  a  far-off 
storm.  He  began  by  talking  of  it. 
"Do  you  know,"  he  would  say, 


102  THE  EGO  BOOK 

"somewhere  there  is  a  woman 
wholly  like  the  woman  of  my 
dreams  and  for  whom  I  represent 
all  happiness.  What  life  does  she 
lead?  I  do  not  know.  But  I 
know  her  nature,  her  aptitudes,  her 
silent  aspirations.  And  of  late 
I  have  begun  to  realize  that  she 
shares  my  dream — that  she,  too, 
is  waiting — that  far  from  me  she 
waits  and  hopes — even  as  I," 
said  Rufus,  "even  as  I!" 

Of  course  he  met  her. 

Now  Rufus  was  a  rectangular, 
iron-brained,  legal  sort  of  a  man; 
his  hair,  which  in  boyhood  had 
been  red,  was  grouse-colored;  he 
had  already  begun  to  look  like  a 
sort  of  man  who  would  sit  on  a 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    103 

judicial  bench  looking  down  with 
disfavor  upon  murderers  and  bad 
husbands  and  reformers. 

And  what  was  the  woman  of  his 
dream,  when  she  appeared  in  real 
Hfe? 

She  was  taller  than  Rufus — one 
of  those  tall,  undulating  blonde 
women,  who  seemed  to  have 
washed  their  hair  in  saffron  and 
star  dust  and  stolen  purple  irises 
for  eyes.  I  thought  of  Dr.  Bara- 
duc  and  said:  "The  ideographic 
chart  of  the  vibrations  of  her 
disharmonious  life  is  written 
over  with  the  odd  multiples  of 
five: 

"5 — sadness  and  monotony. 
15 — aimless  desires. 


104  THE  EGO  BOOK 

25 — ennui  and  nervous  disorder. 

35 — visions — hysteria"  and  I 
pitied   Rufus. 

But  Rufus,  having  met  her  in 
dreams,  knew  more  of  her  than  I 
did,  more  than  Dr.  Baraduc's 
biometer  could  tell  me.  He  had 
sensed  finer  vibrations.  That 
must  have  been  a  wonderful  mo- 
ment when  the  iron  man  told  the 
pale,  saffron-headed  woman  he 
loved  her.  To  me  and  you  it 
seemed  a  shocking  thing  like  be- 
trothing a  water-lily  to  a  firefly. 
But  Rufus  knew;  long  before  he 
saw  the  long,  drooping  body  she 
walked  the  world  in,  he  had  met 
her  in  the  dreams  whereof  you 
have  heard ;  and  she  knew.     They 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    105 

were  not  what  we  thought  they 
were.  Both  of  them  were  walking 
our  world  in  masks  and  dominos. 
When  they  were  alone  they  took 
off  the  disguises.  Rufus  let  down 
the  drawbridge;  and  what  came 
down  the  drawbridge  toward  her 
was  the  gallant  est,  tallest,  smiling- 
est  bridegroom  of  a  man  imagin- 
able— who  was  no  other  than  the 
Gentleman  Inside.  And  when 
Marcelle  (I  didn't  mean  to  write 
her  name,  but  "Machtoub, "  says 
the  Arab:  it  is  written) — when 
Marcelle  came  out  of  her  saffron- 
headed,  narrow,  white  body,  she 
was  not  at  all  the  woman  you  or 
I  could  know,  but  someone  shining 
and  straight  as  a  sword — a  flame 


io6  THE  EGO  BOOK 

without  vacillation — the  radiant 
Lady  Inside. 

Rufus  had  discovered  the  great 
truth. 

The  only  woman  a  man  need 
fear  is  the  woman  he  does  not 
know. 

Is  it  clear? 

Only  the  masked  woman  in 
domino  is  dangerous.  From  her, 
O  superior  man,  flee  for  your  life 
and  your  immortality.  She  is  the 
ego-eater.  She  is  the  devourer  of 
individuality.  But  when  the  Lady 
Inside  steps  forth  she  leaves  her 
weapons  and  her  destructiveness 
behind.  You  may  go  up  to  her 
confidently,  smiling.  You  she  can- 
not hurt,  though  you  stand  there 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION     107 

so  naked  that  even  your  very  hands 
are  empty. 

That  was  Rufus's  way.  It  was 
easy  for  him  because,  even  as  a 
boy,  he  had  acquired  the  knack  of 
letting  down  the  drawbridge  of  his 
fortress,  and,  in  addition,  he  had 
the  uncommon  advantage  of  hav- 
ing met  Marcelle's  Inside  Passen- 
ger when  it  was  bathing  radiantly 
in  dreams.  Even  without  those 
advantages  it  may  be  done;  and 
must,  indeed,  be  done  if  the  sacri- 
fice the  ego  makes  for  love's  sake  is 
not  to  be  a  deadly  and  lethal  thing. 

IV 

A  deadly  and  lethal  thing — 
Only  you  and  I  and,  perhaps, 


io8  THE  EGO  BOOK 

one  very  old  man  remember  now 
that  slim  girl  of  long  ago — all  hair 
and  eyes  and  beauty,  like  a  Persian 
kitten.  One  would  have  said  she 
was  bom  to  go  down  the  way  of 
life  care-free  and  conquering ;  with 
flowers  and  sunlight  and  laughter 
for  her  share  of  the  world.  None 
of  us  saw  that  what  was  strongest 
in  her  was  a  passion  for  self- 
sacrifice  that  was  neither  to  bind 
nor  to  hold.  We  thought  she  was 
bom  for  a  ribboned  and  holidaying 
love. 

This  is  as  much  of  Kathryn's 
story  as  can  be  told:  she  met  a 
guilty  man. 

What  he  was  guilty  of  was  the 
greatest    of    all    sins — the    crime 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION     109 

beside  which  all  other  crimes  are 
virtues — he  lacked  wings. 

When  I  first  saw  him  I  thought 
there  was  something  unnatural 
about  him;  after  a  while  I  saw  it 
was  his  affectation  of  walking  on 
two  legs,  while  his  real  nature  was 
crying  aloud  for  him  to  go  on  all 
fours.  With  that  a  personable 
youth,  with  great  soft  eyes  and  a 
mouth  red  and  heavy  like  some 
kind  of  marsh-plant.  At  that  time 
he  used  to  quiver  with  a  kind  of 
exaltation,  for  love  had  touched 
with  biiming  finger-tips  his  wing- 
less body.  He  was  at  his  best,  for 
even  that  bad  kind  of  love  adds 
something;  but  his  best  was  so  base 
it    called   aloud   for  reformation. 


no  THE  EGO  BOOK 

It  was  in  Kathryn's  destiny  to  hear 
that  call. 

'  *  None  of  you  tinderstands  him, ' ' 
she  would  say  softly,  as  she  stood 
watching  him  go  away  into  the 
night — insolent  in  his  happiness, 
and  on  his  lips  the  taste  of  June 
roses  and  honey. 

I  wish  I  could  say  that  the  death 
of  that  wingless  scoundrel  was 
befitting  his  life;  that  the  three 
Noms  saw  to  it ;  but  I  cannot,  for 
he  still  walks  the  earth — ^with 
the  same  absurd  affectation  of  not 
going  on  all  fours. 

But  who  am  I  and  who  are  you 
to  judge  the  Man  Inside  his  foul, 
vice-choked  dwelling? 

It  was  not  for  the  part  of  him 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION     in 

we  see  that  little  Kathryn  made  of 
herself  a  sacrifice  and  a  burned 
offering. 

The  thing  is  terribly  hard  to 
understand.  For  years  whenever 
I  thought  of  it  I  was  beaten  upon 
by  iron  winds  of  wrath.  That 
some  love  must  be  all  sacrifice,  I 
know;  but  that  it  shoiild  be  hers! 
She  was  so  young  and  small.  And 
I  know  that  her  sacrifice,  since  it 
was  for  another  and  not  for  self, 
had  in  it  the  seeds  of  life  and 
immortality.  It  was  in  the  way 
of  evolution.  It  was  with  the 
inflexible  law  and  not  against  it. 

But  could  she  have  protected 
herself? 

No  one  else  could  protect  her. 


112  THE  EGO  BOOK 

What  was  to  be  done  she  had  to 
do  for  herself.  And  she  could  do 
nothing  because  the  one  thing  she 
wanted  to  do  was  to  sacrifice 
herself.  Not  going  blindly  about 
it,  she  saw  the  beginning  of  the 
road  and  perhaps  the  end  of 
it. 

It  would  seem,  then,  that  the 
woman  stands  in  as  dire  peril  of 
love  as  the  man.  If,  when  she 
goes  forth  from  her  fortress  and 
comes  to  a  barred  door;  if,  when 
she  beats  her  little  hands  on  the 
barred  door  it  does  not  open;  if, 
when  she  calls  aloud  there  is  No 
One  Inside  who  can  come  out  to 
her;  then  she  can  do  only  what 
Kathryn  did — choose  that  sacri- 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    113 

fice  of  the  ego  in  which  there  is  life, 
not  death. 

There  is  small  record  of  it  all 
now — merely  the  white  stone  with 
part  of  her  name  on  it;  and  yotir 
fading  memory,  and  mine. 


And  how  shall  one  know  when 
one  has  met  The  Woman,  she 
who  is  ipsissima? 

Is  it  this  tall  girl,  healthy, 
valiant,  and  gay?  Is  it  that  dark 
girl,  all  flame  and  mystery? 

Only  she  can  give  you  the 
answer;  you  alone  can  hear  it. 

But  (frankly)  I  think  you  can 
get  a  hint  of  whether  she  is  The 
Woman  or  not,  if  you  are  able 


114  THE  EGO  BOOK 

(in  utter  honesty)  to  say  to  the 
Man  Inside  you:  "All  is  well,  for 
I  look  upon  her  as  the  eventual 
mother  of  my  children." 

That  is  a  splendid  saying;  splen- 
did as  quartz — and  in  it  gold 
striations  of  immortalities. 

And  she? 

How  may  she  know  this  red  and 
violent  Rufus  is  The  Man;  he  who 
is  ipsissimus? 

She  alone  can  tell;  for  only 
she  can  hear  the  voice  from 
within. 

But  (frankly)  I  think  she  may 
get  a  hint  as  to  whether  he  is  The 
Man  or  not,  if  she  can  say  to  The 
Lady  Inside:  "All  is  well,  dear 
one;  I  look  upon  him  in  the  fine 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    115 

Roman  way  as  cunarum  emptor — 
a  buyer  of  cradles." 

And  I  think  of  a  baby  crawling 
on  the  floor;  when  a  baby,  crawl- 
ing on  the  floor,  finds  anything 
there — from  a  beetle  to  a  button — 
he  puts  it  in  his  mouth.  And  I 
think  of  woman,  wandering  about 
the  earth  and  going  to  and  fro  in 
it;  when  a  woman  finds  anything 
bright,  absurd,  and  casual,  she 
picks  it  up  and  puts  it  on  her  head? 
It  doesn't  matter  what  it  is — a 
beetle,  a  button,  a  dead  bird,  a 
bunch  of  grass,  a  scarlet  rag,  glass 
beads,  the  skin  of  a  frog  or  the 
tail  of  a  squirrel — anything  gay 
and  foolish.  I  do  not  know  that 
any  scientist  has  explained  why 


ii6  THE  EGO  BOOK 

women — always  and  in  every  land 
and  on  every  degree  of  latitude — 
put  these  strange  and  dreadful 
things  on  their  heads.  Philoso- 
phers have  never  given  a  solu- 
tion of  this  amazing  habit.  My 
own  theory  (I  think)  is  sound. 

For  ages  women  have  been 
putting  these  ridiculous  things  on 
their  heads  with  the  sly,  indirect 
desire  of  making  men  see  that  they 
are  uncrowned.  What  she  is  try- 
ing to  say  in  her  oblique  way  is: 
"Don't  you  see,  you've  forgotten 
to  give  me  a  crown!"  The  idiot 
does  not  see;  he  is  a  blind  ass; 
and  the  patient  woman  goes  on 
putting  bright  things  on  her  head, 
in  the  long  hope  that  some  day  he 


A  LOVER'S  PROTECTION    117 

will  see  what  she  is  hinting  at. 
Every  woman  knows,  at  heart, 
that  she  ought  to  have  a  crown. 
This  belief  is  embedded  in  her 
nature,  like  a  triangle  in  a  circle. 
Beautiful  or  ugly,  chatelaine  or 
serf,  she  has  an  instinctive  knowl- 
edge that  she  is  only  provisorily 
inferior;  and  she  is  right — some- 
where down  the  lane  of  evolution 
there  waits  for  her  a  splendid, 
spiritual  revenge. 

But  O  woman,  do  not  take  it  yet ; 
above  all  do  not  take  it  upon  that 
little  ego  in  the  cradle,  squalling 
"I  am  I."  He  too  is  aged  and 
hunting  for  a  crown,  as  you  are. 

If  he  is  haughty,  humor  him; 
treat  him  as  a  distinguished  guest 


ii8  THE  EGO  BOOK 

— a  man  of  some  celebrity,  who  is 
stopping  in  your  house  for  a  while. 
Bear  with  him — even  as  you  have 
borne  him. 

And  don't  be  a  mother  to  him. 


Chapter  V 

How  to  Get  What  Yo«  "Want;  Also  How 

to  Ptevcnt  Others  From  Taking 

It  Away  From  You 


Y 


{"'\  ^OU  have  not  said  a  word 
about  physical  health." 
Quite  true;  so  far  I 
have  not  said  anything  about  the 
body's  well-being.  Of  course  it  is 
an  essential  thing;  indeed  the  most 
essential  thing;  for  there  is  small 
pleasure  in  possessing  gold  basins 
if  you  can  spit  only  blood  into 

119 


120  THE  EGO  BOOK 

them;  but  I  have  taken  it  for 
granted  that  you  will  house  the 
Gentleman  Inside  in  a  cleanly  and 
nobly-kept  mansion.  That  is  un- 
derstood.) 

You  have  seen  the  ego  wake, 
screaming  to  a  knowledge  of  its 
glorious  self;  you  have  seen  its 
pathetic  struggle  to  hold  its  own 
in  a  clash  of  family  interests;  you 
have  seen  it  go  warily  round  friend 
and  foe,  seeking  a  way  of  captur- 
ing those  fortresses;  and  you  have 
seen  it  in  the  more  perilous  adven- 
tures of  love  and  marriage. 

And  now  (are  you  quite  com- 
fortable? Let  me  put  a  pillow 
at  your  back).  I  am  going  to 
ask   you   to   consider   the   ego — 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING    121 

the  Man  Inside — in  its  broader 
relationship  to  that  group,  which 
is  known  as  htunanity.  At  this 
point,  you  see,  one  may  go  down 
one  of  many  roads.  Up  to  this 
point  we  have  come  down  a  high- 
way; here  the  ways  branch  and 
cross  Hke  the  nerves  in  the  hand. 
And  here  one  must  pick  and 
choose. 

I  do  not  know  what  your  business 
in  the  world  is;  I  do  not  greatly 
care;  it  may  be  carving  heroic, 
eternal  statues  like  George  Gray 
Barnard;  it  may  be,  like  James 
Huneker,  fashioning  (of  steel  and 
gold  and  crystal)  perfect  prose; 
it  may  be  splitting  matches — 
dreary  work  if  the  knife  be  dull; 


122  THE  EGO  BOOK 

it  may  be  breeding  orchids;  it 
may  be  writing  fugues,  or  building 
walls,  or  scouring  sewers,  or  selling 
coats,  or  buying  money;  whatever 
it  is,  I  am  going  to  write  about  it. 

And  first  of  all 

The  world  belongs  to  the  man 
who  is  aware  of  his  ego. 

The  world,  I  say,  belongs  to  the 
man  who  knows  himself  and  who  is 
so  entirely  the  master  of  his  will 
and  his  thought,  that  he  can  do 
things  without  giving  men  any 
answer  other  than  "yes"  or  "no" 
— indifferently — all  his  life  long. 
That  man  is  Bismarck;  that  man 
is  every  man  who  has  ever  held 
the  world  in  his  hands. 

He  knows  himself;  he  has  come 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   123 

to  a  clear  understanding  with  his 
ego;  and  he  knows  exactly  what 
he  wants  to  do — exactly. 

I  met  (it  was  in  a  book)  one 
of  Gorki's  Homeric  tramps;  his 
name  was  Malva;  and  his  con- 
fession was,  in  its  essence,  the 
confessions  of  all  the  wastrels  on 
earth.     Said  Malva: 

"If  I'd  only  been  able  to  know 
what  I  wanted!  I  have  always 
wanted  something!  I  wish — what? 
— I  don't  know.  Sometimes  I 
want  to  leap  into  a  balloon  and 
go  oversea,  far-away,  very  far. 
Then  again,  I  shoiild  like  to  turn 
all  men  into  tops  and  set  them 
spinning  round  and  round  in  front 
of  me.     I  should  like  to  look  at 


124  THE  EGO  BOOK 

them  and  laugh.  Sometimes  I 
am  sorry  for  all  the  world  and  for 
myself,  especially  for  myself.  And 
at  another  time  I  feel  like  killing 
everybody  in  horrible  ways — and 
myself  too.  And  I  don't  know 
what  I  want." 

That  is  the  wastrel,  a  Homeric 
one  if  you  will,  but  still  the  eternal 
wastrel.  This  evening  (as  I  walked 
out  with  my  dog)  I  saw  him  sitting 
on  a  bench  in  the  park,  ragged, 
patient  as  though  he  expected  the 
East  Wind  to  bring  him  supper  and 
a  tent — the  man  who  did  not 
know  what  he  wanted;  the  man 
who  was  not  on  speaking  terms 
with  his  ego  and  could  in  nowise 
find  out  what  he  wanted.    A  less 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING  125 

Homeric  Malva;  and  a  passing 
policeman  prodded  him  with  a  club 
and  he  drifted  on,  no- whither. 

You  can  have  what  you  want — 
if  you  know  what  it  is  you  want, 
and  if  you  and  the  Man  Inside  are 
of  one  mind.  You  must  get  it 
clear  in  your  understanding  that 
he  is  the  head  of  the  firm.  He  it 
was  (and  no  other)  who  woke  and 
roared:  "Lo,  I  am  I."  It  was 
he  who  rode,  conquering,  down 
love's  road.  And  unless  he  shouts 
through  your  mouth,  your  voice  is 
but  a  whisper  and  no  man  will 
heed  it.  Unless  his  voice  is  speak- 
ing, the  Adversary  will  not  go  back 
when  you  bid  him  go  back  and 
give  you  room  and  place. 


126  THE  EGO  BOOK 

(The  Adversary? 

You  know  what  I  mean;  the 
Adversary  is  anonymous  because 
he  is  collective — he  is  all  things 
and  all  men.  The  harshness  of 
any  one  man  to  you  is  only  the 
advanced,  out-thrust  point  of  the 
harshness  of  mankind  to  man- 
kind. The  child  who  dirties  you 
as  you  pass  is  not  throwing  his 
own  dirt;  it  is  the  dirt  of  a  city, 
a  caste,  a  civilization.  The  Ad- 
versary is  terrible  because  he  is 
collective.) 

If  you  are  on  good  terms  with 
the  Man  Inside ;  if  you  know  what 
the  ego  wants,  you  have  but  to 
step  forth  and  take  it  in  your 
hands. 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   127 
II 

There  has  been  coming  into  the 
world  of  late  a  kind  of  ego  that 
wanted  wealth. 

I  rather  admire  that  sort  of  man. 
There  is  something  splendid  about 
riches — a  splendor  so  captivating 
that  in  many  religions  you  will  find 
heaven  pictured  as  a  kind  of  ideal- 
ized goldsmith's  shop. 

Wealth  is  ennobling. 

Do  not  lend  ear  to  the  harsh 
cries  of  the  poor  man,  who  is,  in 
our  civilization,  merely  a  man  who 
wants  to  be  rich;  riches  make  for 
virtue.  To  be  rich  is  to  be  three- 
parts  of  the  way  on  to  perfection. 
To  be  poor — O  rare  Owen  Feltham ! 


128  THE  EGO  BOOK 

— is  to  be  made  a  pavement  for  the 
tread  of  full-minded  men. 

Quisquis  habet  nummos 

(There  is,  I  admit,  something 
mystic  and  salvational  about 
poverty;  it  is  indeed  a  sacred 
thing — a  sacred  attribute  of  Divine 
Integrity,  which  has  always  come 
into  the  world,  symbolically,  with 
empty  hands;  but  that  mysticism 
has  no  place  in  this  book.) 

Wealth  is  good. 

That  was  a  fine  Aryan  saying: 
"He  who  sows  com  sows  holiness " ; 
it  lies  at  the  basis  of  our  Aryan 
civilization. 

I  happen  to  have  met  (casually) 
one  of  these  egos  who  come  into  the 
world  bent  upon  getting  wealth. 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   129 

It  was  housed  in  the  body  of  an  old 
man — an  old  man,  incredibly  alert 
and  awake  and  shrewd.  Under 
the  name  of  Mr.  John  D.  Rocke- 
feller he  had  come  to  Compiegne 
in  France  in  order  to  escape  the 
ennuis  and  notorieties  of  being  the 
richest  man  in  America.  And  he 
used  to  "potter  about"  the  streets 
and  roads.  Not  idly.  Many  things 
had  happened  in  that  pleasant 
comer  of  the  world — things  mem- 
orable, epochal,  eternal.  They  in- 
terested him  not  at  all.  Not  idly, 
he  went  about  asking :  * '  How  much 
do  these  workingmen  get?  How 
much  can  they  live  on?  What 
is  the  price  of  this — and  that — and 
what  are  the  taxes?  " 


130  THE  EGO  BOOK 

Day  after  day,  he  put  this  kind 
of  questions  to  the  men  he  met  in 
his  walks.  Every  question  had 
to  do  with  his  life  purpose,  which 
is,  I  presume,  getting  wealth. 

It  was  right.  His  will  was 
shaped,  one-pointed,  like  a  spear. 
It  wasn't  like  a  wheel  and  it 
wasn't  like  a  skein  of  tangled  wool. 
He  and  the  Man  Inside  were  of  one 
mind  and  of  one  will ;  they  wanted 
wealth;  and — I  trust  I  am  not 
violating  his  confidence — they  got 
it. 

As  you  may. 

As  any  man  may  and  indeed 
must,  if  his  will,  one-pointed  like  a 
spear,  is  aimed  at  that  thing  and 
no   other.     When    I    say   will,    I 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   131 

mean  will;  I  mean  the  decree, 
unalterable,  irrecusable,  of  the  ego; 
I  mean  the  indefectible  warrant  of 
the  Man  Inside ;  that  is  the  will. 

It  is  true — ^it  is  a  desolating  truth 
— ^that  in  that  high  sense  of  the 
word  very  few  men  have  a  will  at 
all. 

They  have  wants;  they  have 
desires;  but  the  Inner  Man  sends 
forth  no  fierce  and  blasting  ukase: 
"Thus  Do  Thou!" 

Yet  these  flabby  things  with- 
out a  will — ^with  only  desires — get 
what  they  really  want.  Marvel- 
ously,  mysteriously,  every  man 
gets  what  he  wishes  most  to  have. 
The  strong  self -knowing,  ego-ac- 
quainted man  wills:  "I  shall  be 


132  THE  EGO  BOOK 

rich";  and  he  is  rich.  The  man 
whose  ego  is  within  him,  Hke  a 
blind  stariing  in  a  cage,  has  no 
will;  instead  he  has  only  wishes — 
futile,  fluttering,  feeble,  feckless 
things;  but  even  they  have  their 
way  with  him.  He  is  their  victim ; 
he  is  not  the  master,  as  one  whose 
victorious  will  is  a  ukase  of  the  Tsar 
Within;  but  they  have  their  way. 

That  wastrel  in  the  park,  prod- 
ded by  Law  in  Buttons;  he  was 
precisely  what  his  desires  had 
made  him. 

And  that  tawdry  girl,  shaming 
the  street-lamps? 

And  that  drunkard,  taking  the 
edge  of  the  alley  or  smouldering 
in  his  club? 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   133 

What  they  most  desire  they 
have;  for  it  is  an  iron  law  that  no 
man  shall  fail  of  his  desire. 

Ill 

Wealth? 

You  shall  have  it,  if  that  be  the 
"will  of  the  Man  Inside. 

Power? 

You  shall  have  it,  if  the  Tsar 
Inside  decrees  it. 

Wisdom? 

If  He  Within  has  willed  it,  you 
shall  have  wisdom. 

It  is  ordained  by  a  law  as 
inflexible  and  timeless  as  that 
which  makes  of  every  atom  a  tiny 
solar  system  spinning  in  decent 
order.     The  law  is  absolute  as  an 


134  THE  EGO  BOOK 

axiom ;  but  it  has  a  corollary.  And 
this  is  a  truth  so  important  that 
it  would  be  well,  I  think,  to  stand 
back  for  a  moment  and  look  at  it 
in  perspective.  One  might  even 
approach  it  by  way  of  Ben  Bolt. 

Ben  Bolt  is  my  saddle-horse, 
a  noble,  sorrel-coated  gentleman 
such  as  it  was  the  good  fortune  of 
Captain  Gulliver  to  know.  (The 
account  is  in  his  travels.) 

I  ride  Ben  Bolt;  I  get  astride 
his  spine  and  grip  his  barrel  with 
my  thighs  and  bid  him  trot — and 
he  trots ;  I  lift  the  reins  in  a  know- 
ing way  and  he  breaks  into  that 
glorious,  tumbling  gallop  which 
takes  us  over  the  long  hills  into 
the  sunrise.     Now  when  we  come 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   135 

back  (after  the  glorious  sweat  and 
triumph  of  that  gallop)  I  rub  him 
down  (if  Edward  isn't  about)  and 
wash  his  feet  and  swab  out  his  good 
old  mouth  and  give  him  the  free- 
dom of  his  box-stall.  In  other 
words  I  have  used  Ben  Bolt,  but 
he  is  better — as  I  am — for  the 
using. 

That  is  the  corollary,  whereof  we 
had  word. 

A  man  may  gain  power,  but  he 
cannot  guard  it,  unless  he  so  uses 
his  power  that  others  are  the 
better  for  it — that  they  are  made 
stronger  and  more  capable  of  exer- 
cising power  themselves.  •  You  do 
not  want  illustrations  of  that  fact 
out  of  history;  all  history  is  an 


136  THE  EGO  BOOK 

illustration  of  it.  In  the  immense 
pentimbral  forest  of  historic  As- 
similations there  is  always  the  same 
story — ^the  same  infinitely  com- 
plicated web  of  the  same  eternal 
fact — which  is :  No  man  may  have 
power  unless  others  are  the  better 
for  his  having  it.  And  what  is 
true  of  power  is  true  of  wealth; 
and  of  wisdom — only  he  possesses 
wisdom  who  scatters  it. 

Do  you  mind  glancing  back  at 
the  ground  we  have  covered  in 
this  chapter? 

There  are  certain  statements 
upon  which  I  should  like  to  lay 
the  emphasis  of  repetition. 

What  the  Inner  Man  wills  he 
may   have — must   have,  in   fact. 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   137 

And  if  there  be  no  assertive  ego, 
declaring  its  will,  and  its  purpose, 
then  the  vague,  futile  wishes  will 
have  their  way.  (Have  you  ever 
met  a  wisher? — who  pauses  at  a 
shop  window  and  says:  "I  wish 
I  had  that  watch!"  and  hails  the 
passing  motor-car  with:  "I  wish 
I  had  that  car!"  None  of  these 
things  will  he  have;  what  he  will 
get  is  full  opportunity  to  exercise 
this  wantoning  habit  of  mind; 
and  his  life,  taking  the  way  of 
least  resistance,  will  go  to  slavery, 
drunkenness,  the  commonness  of 
street-lamps,  or  that  eternal  wish- 
ing-place,  the  bench  in  the  park.) 

What  the  man  wills 

The  will  of  the  ego  is  iron;  it  is 


138  THE  EGO  BOOK 

pointed  like  a  flame;  it  shows  the 
way.  If  you  and  the  Man  Inside 
have  made  your  purpose  wealth 
you  can  achieve  your  end;  but 
you  may  not  wanton  by  the  way. 
Like  that  old,  ardent,  and  active 
man  of  Compiegne,  you  must  think 
of  nothing  else — you  must  think 
all  things  in  terms  of  wealth.  But 
(the  corollary!)  riches  that  make 
another  poorer  are  not  riches; 
they  are  loot.  Is  it  possible  to 
get  rich  by  making  others  richer? 
My  dear  son  of  the  Quirites,  there 
is  no  other  way,  which  is,  at  once 
practical  and  permanent.  The 
man  who  makes  others  poorer  is 
always  poor;  the  miser  is  always 
in  want — indeed,  the  very  word 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   139 

miser  has  a  mysterious  significance 
of  want,  destitution,  misery.  The 
reason  is  plain.  The  miser  fails  to 
see  that  he  is  not  alone  and  cannot 
be  alone,  that  he  is,  indeed,  only 
part  of  a  formidable  whole.  Your 
ego  learned  that  truth  long  ago. 
And  you  know  that  wealth,  power, 
wisdom  are  as  a  flowing  stream, 
which  is  sweet  because  it  flows — • 
past  your  garden  to  your  neigh- 
bor's field.  If  it  did  not  flow 
away  from  you  it  would  not  be  a 
stream;  it  would  be  a  pond,  which 
is  the  home  of  dead  dogs  and 
poison. 

Then,  once  more,  the  will  must 
be  fixed  on  one  object — not  on  two 
or  seven  objects.     A  bullet  will 


140  THE  EGO  BOOK 

bring  the  quarry  down;  that  is 
will ;  the  quarry  is  wholly  indiffer- 
ent to  the  scattered  shot  of  fuga- 
cious wishes  and  hopes  and  desires. 

The  man  who  gets  what  he 
wants  is  one-purposed. 

As  from  a  cellar  of  discontent, 
I  hear  a  pleading  voice ;  and  it  asks : 

"May  I  have  no  pleasures  at 
all?" 

Dear  son  of  the  Quirites,  the 
only  pleasures  you  can  have  are 
those  which  fit  in  with  your  pur- 
pose, those  which  affirm  the  will, 
those  which  build  the  conquering 
character. 

"A  poor,  barren  life,"  you  say. 

But,  don't  you  see,  that  if  you 
are  following  the  way  of  the  ego — 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   141 

the  straight  Hne  of  the  will — you 
are  getting  all  you  want,  everything 
you  want  —  everything.  What 
other    pleasure  is  there?     None. 

You  may  have  observed  that 
nothing  makes  a  rich  man  so 
indignant  as  the  sight  of  a  poor 
man  spending  money  on  his  amuse- 
ments. 

At  first  glance  you  feel  like 
throwing  a  brick  at  the  rich  man. 
A  moment's  reflection  will  show 
you  that  the  rich  man  (from  his 
viewpoint)  is  right.  His  object 
in  life  is  so  clear  and  pleasant — it 
is  getting  wealth — that  he  can 
conceive  of  no  other  tolerable 
occupation;  he  looks  upon  the 
poor  man,  seeking  amusement,  as 


142  THE  EGO  BOOK 

a  wantoner.  What  he  forgets  is 
that  the  poor  man  may  be  seeking 
other  things — wisdom,  perhaps; 
and  finds  pleasure  hunting  a  way 
of  getting  wisdom. 

Know  yourself:  learn  what  the 
ego  wants — and  neither  men,  nor 
castes,  nor  cities  can  prevent  your 
getting  it.  It  is  a  law;  just  as  it 
is  a  law  that  you  can  keep  nothing 
unless  other  men,  castes,  cities, 
are  the  better  for  your  having  it. 

"  Machtoub, "  said  the  Arab, 
once  again:  it  is  written. 

IV 

If  your  choice  is  not  wealth,  but 
wisdom,  you  will  admire  the  sage 
prayer  of  Apollonius : 


GETTING  AND  KEEPING   143 


it  • 


1  pray  that  justice  may  pre- 
vail, that  laws  may  not  be  broken, 
that  the  wise  may  be  poor  and  the 
rest  of  mankind  rich — ^but  not  by 
fraud." 


Oiapter  VI 

The  Hive  and  The  Bee 

I 

rE  emerging   ego   is  bom 
into  a  city,  a  caste,  a  civil- 
ization; which  is  a  strange 
thing.    And — a   stranger  thing — 
every  man  is  the  siim-total  of  his 
race. 

(This  does  away  with  any  feeHng 
of  loneliness.) 

When  one  thinks  of  the  millions 
of  Smiths  and  Montmorencies,  of 

Mclngaracks    and    Browns    that 
144 


THE  HIVE  AND  THE  BEE      145 

have  gone  to  one's  making,  a 
bewildered  sense  of  kinship  takes 
hold  of  one.  One  hesitates  to 
throw  a  stone  at  a  blind  beggar  for 
fear  one  might  really  be  hitting  a 
cousin — only  thrice  removed.  One 
cannot  comfortably  poison  a  well, 
for  fear  one  of  his  innimierable 
relations  may  not  drink  of  it. 
One  never  knows.  The  proudest 
man  may,  in  some  dark  way,  be 
sib  to  an  Ulsterman.  In  the  face 
of  this  blasting  possibility  one  has 
to  walk  warily  down  the  crowded 
way  of  the  world. 

I  have  said  that  every  atom  in 
you  is  a  solar  system  en  miniature; 
and  so  are  you  a  solar  system;  and 
so   are  the  caste,   the   city,   the 


146  THE  EGO  BCMDK 

civilization  into  which  you  and 
your  atoms  are  bom.  It  is  a 
thought  to  set  the  brain  rocking — 
this  implacable  unity  of  visibles 
and  invisibles,  of  the  infinitely 
small  and  the  infinitely  great. 
And  fearfully  one  asks:  "What  is 
to  become  of  my  ego  in  this  welter- 
ing unity?" 

Bide  a  bit ;  you  may  see. 

One  of  man's  peculiar  privileges 
is  his  curious  faculty  of  seeing 
himself  as  other  than  he  is. 

He  occupies  in  space  a  planet  of 
absolutely  no  cosmic  importance; 
and,  absurdly  small  as  his  planet 
is,  his  life  is  so  short  that  he  never 
manages  to  crawl  round  it  before 
death  takes  him.     (It  took  him 


THE  mVE  AND  THE  BEE    147 

thousands  of  years  to  learn  that 
his  earth  was  round;  and  thou- 
sands more  to  know  it  was  ovoid ; 
if,  by  change,  it  is  square,  he  will 
not  discover  it  for  twenty — or 
forty — centuries  to  come.) 

At  this  point  a  realization  of  his 
own  insignificance  beats  in  upon 
him.  He  looks  about  him.  What 
he  sees  is  that  he  is  in  an  ant-heap 
where  millions  upon  millions  of  his 
kind,  recognizably  like  himself, 
swarm  and  fester.  And  he  says: 
"God  help  me!  do  I  indeed  exist? 
Am  I  not  a  mere  conjunct  part  of 
this  awful  and  turbulent  unity — 
not  to  be  isolated!" 

The  man  whose  ego  is  awake  has 
passed  this  point;  long  ago  he  has 


148  THE  EGO  BOOK 

answered  this  black  and  fear- 
ful riddle;  victoriously  he  has 
shouted  his:  "I  am — thou  art — 
the  other  is."  He  knows;  but 
his  battle  is  none  the  less 
savage. 

The  collective  soul  is  always 
armed  against  the  individual  who 
tries  to  escape  from  it. 

The  collective  soul? 

The  phrase  is  in  Pythagoras. 
He  warned  the  Crotonians  that  a 
village  has  a  soul  made  of  the  con- 
sensus of  its  inhabitants.  The 
soul  of  united  villages  forms  the 
soul  of  a  people;  and  at  this  point 
of  accumulated  force  there  is  gener- 
ated the  monstrous  entity  called 
country — patria — an  abstract  col- 


THE  HIVE  AND  THE  BEE   149 

lectivity.  You  may  indeed  think 
of  it  as  a  monster  more  terrible 
than  the  minotaur — its  hecatombs 
are  wars,  his  rites  armed  peace. 
We  are  looking  upon  this  collec- 
tivity as  a  monster,  because  that 
is  precisely  what  it  is,  so  far  as  the 
individual  is  concerned.  It  is  a 
polypus  with  monstrous  tentacles 
— political,  military,  judicial,  edu- 
cational; and  from  it  the  individ- 
ual cannot  escape;  he  must  live 
in  its  tentacular  orbit,  amid  the 
whirling  arms  and  sucking  mouths. 
Some  men  have  escaped  from  it, 
you  say  ?  Few  men ;  mostly  mani- 
acs; escape  is  hardly  possible. 
The  cat  puts  up  with  an  inquiet 
and   precarious   existence,    rather 


150  THE  EGO  BOOK 

than  identify  itself,  doggishly,  with 
a  master;  but  man  has  not  feline 
freedom — ^he  is  tied  to  the  collec- 
tivity; he  is  part  of  it,  just  as  he 
is  part  of  all  the  Smiths  and 
Smythes  and  the  man  (God 
help  him!)  from  the  North  of 
Ireland. 

One's  ego  is  in  a  bad  way,  it 
would  seem,  soused  and  immersed 
in  a  sea  of  universal  kinship;  and, 
when  it  lifts  its  head  above  water, 
it  is  gripped  and  strangled  by  the 
polypus — by  the  collectivity  of 
race,  caste,  country. 

How  is  the  ego  to  preserve  its 
free  identity? — its  right  to  vo- 
ciferate "I  am  I" — ^in  this  welter 
of  opposing  forces? 


THE  mVE  AND  THE  BEE  151 
II 

Two  things  are  to  be  borne  in 
mind. 

Evolution  works  for  the  type 
and  not  for  the  mass — for  the 
individual  and  not  for  the  col- 
lectivity. It  has  worked  for  you, 
my  dear  Philemon,  perfecting  that 
rare  force,  which  is  your  ego,  but 
— a  bi-partite  law — while  it  was 
pushing  you  forward,  it  was  urging 
forward,  also,  the  mass  of  hu- 
manity from  which  you  have  not 
wholly  emerged.  You  are,  I  as- 
sume, the  advanced  point — the 
most  advanced  point — of  himian- 
ity,  but  you  can  travel  no  faster 
than  the  mass  to  which  you  are 


152  THE  EGO  BOOK 

linked.  (A  composite  mass,  made 
up  of  strata  of  life-animal,  vege- 
table, mineral.  You  are  cousin 
to  the  field-mouse  and  the  terra- 
pin; even  the  stone  they  will  lay 
upon  your  grave  is  a  dumb,  dark- 
brooding  brother.) 

It  is  a  tragic  law  that  if  you 
wotdd  go  fast  and  far  you  must 
haul  after  you — far  and  fast — the 
mass  behind  you.  And  it  follows 
that  your  good  is  the  good  of  all. 
Of  course  this  is  a  commonplace — 
as  common  as  sunlight — an  old 
universal  truth. 

Your  good  is  the  good  of  all. 

It  is  a  statement  which  contains 
all  truth,  moral,  political,  eco- 
nomical ;  precisely  as  all  geometric 


THE  HIVE  AND  THE  BEE   153 

elements  are  contained  in  a  circle, 
all  truths  are  packed  into  that  one 
true  saying:  Unless  a  thing  be 
good  for  the  hive  it  is  not  good 
for  the  bee. 

That  is  all  very  well,  you  say, 
but  how  am  I  to  protect  my  ego — 
which  after  all  is  my  main  concern ; 
how  am  I  to  pay  my  debt  to  the 
hive  and  yet  protect  myself? 

It  is  the  one  question  of  import- 
ance; it  has  been  asked  in  tumult 
and  revolution;  it  has  been  an- 
swered in  slavery  and  despair.  It 
is  a  dilemma;  in  fact  it  is  the 
unhappy  dilemma  of  Balaam's 
ass,  which  was  that  either  he  must 
fall  down  flat  or  run  upon  a  sword. 

Every  philosophy  the  world  has 


154  THE  EGO  BOOK 

ever  had  has  been  an  attempt  to 
solve  this  riddle.  Every  experi- 
ment in  government  has  been 
another  attempt.  Man  has  never 
done  anything  but  try  to  find  a 
way  of  living  with  safety,  con- 
venience, and  delight  among  the 
miiltitudinous  entities  that  sur- 
round him.  He  has  done  nothing 
but  try  to  live  in  the  hive,  while 
preserving  his  own  indomitable 
sense  of  individual  bee-hood — of 
remaining  a  nobly-isolated,  self- 
respecting  bee. 

You  do  not  expect  me,  Phile- 
mon, to  give  you  a  rule  which  shall 
answer  this  old  question;  but  it 
may  be  that  along  this  line  of 
thought  you  will  find  a  suggestion. 


THE  mVE  AND  THE  BEE   155 

Evolution  is  working  with  you; 
it  is  striving  to  create  out  of  the 
mass  a  perfecter  type  of  man;  it 
has  absolutely  no  concern  what- 
soever for  the  mass;  its  concern  is 
wholly  with  you — its  type.  Now, 
the  more  vehemently  you  affirm 
your  ego,  the  more  surely  are  you 
working  with  the  law  of  evolution 
— toward  what  end  I  know  not, 
save  in  so  far  as  having  seen  the 
beginning  of  the  curve  of  life  I 
can  plot  the  continuing  direction, 
mathematically  exact,  of  the  curv- 
ing line. 

Every  affirmation  of  your  ego 
is  with  the  law.  You  cannot 
exaggerate  the  tremendous  import- 
ance  of  clearing   a   space   round 


156  THE  EGO  BOOK 

your  ego — so  that  it  may  stand, 
like  a  statue  in  a  public  square,  the 
light  and  air  and  ether  all  round 
it.  You  cannot  be  too  positively 
Philemon.  If  you  are  John  Smith, 
you  must  John-Smith  yourself  with 
hourly  affirmation;  and  if  you  are 
Cecil  Smythe,  you  must  know, 
with  granite  certainty,  that  you 
are  he.  You  are  John  or  you  are 
Cecil  only  because  you  have,  with 
infinite  age-long  effort,  projected 
yourself  out  of  the  mass — the 
anonymous  Johnless  and  Cecilless 
collectivity;  and  the  moment  you 
cease  to  affirm  it,  that  moment  you 
begin  to  slide  back  into  the  con- 
fused and  unidentified  mass.  Your 
only  way  of  life  is  to  be  victoriously 


THE  HIVE  AND  THE  BEE   157 

John  Smith — or  Philemon;  your 
only  grip  on  immortality  is  your 
John-Smithness.  There  is  no  other 
passport  to  life. 

And  the  other  bees  in  the 
hive? 

Unless  they  are  living  with 
safety  and  convenience  (if  not 
with  delight)  you  will  find  small 
opportunity  for  being  Philemon, 
ipsissimus.  Thus  it  is  a  duty  to 
yourself  to  see  that  there  is  har- 
mony in  the  hive;  that  there  is 
honey  equally  distributed;  that 
the  wax  roof  is  in  repair. 

The  Man  Inside  you — the  Hid- 
den Workman,  Paracelsus  called 
him — does  not  work  for  others, 
except  for  the  compelling  reason 


158  THE  EGO  BOOK 

that  it  is  only  by  working  for 
others  that  he  can  get  his  own 
work  perfectly  done. 

Ill 

The  difference  between  a  poli- 
tician and  a  statesman  is  not  that 
the  latter  is  dead  and  the  former 
isn't;  there  is  a  finer  distinction; 
the  statesman  is  working  for  the 
state  that  he  may,  more  splendidly, 
advance  his  ego — making  a  fitter 
world  for  it  to  live  in;  the  poli- 
tician is  burrowing  back  into 
the  mass  in  order  to  find  safe- 
ty, warmth,  fat  comfort  for 
himself. 

One  is  going  with  evolution;  it 
is  the  way  of  life;  the  other  is 


THE  HIVE  AND  THE  BEE   159 

going  death's  way  back  to  col- 
lective  anonjmiity. 

You  are  living  in  a  caste,  a  city, 
a  nation. 

The  form  of  government  in 
which  you  live  does  not  greatly 
matter;  and  cannot  indeed  be 
changed  until  the  mass  has  changed 
— has  got  at  another  stage  of  ev- 
olution— for  government  is  a  na- 
tural product  of  the  mass.  The 
same  law  which  directs  the  tiny 
cell  directs  the  man;  and  the  same 
law  which  directs  the  man  directs 
the  himian  collectivity.  Scien- 
tifically. Immutably.  The  gov- 
ernment, whether  it  was  called 
theocracy,  monarchy,  republic,  or 
empire,  was  always  exactly  fitted 


i6o  THE  EGO  BOOK 

to  the  collective  mass  of  humanity, 
at  the  stage  of  development  it  had 
then  reached. 

To-day  a  social  transformation 
has  unquestionably  begun.  The 
himian  mass  has  changed  its  place 
along  the  road  of  evolution. 

When  will  the  transformation 
get  itself  accomplished? 

In  ten  years — in  a  hundred — in 
two  hundred;  in  a  timeless  world 
there  is  no  need  of  greater  pre- 
cision. In  a  certain  time  there 
will  be  a  new  and  happier  life  on 
earth,  because  the  advancing  col- 
lectivity will  find  it  has  produced 
a  hive-law  which  fits  it  more 
comfortably  than  the  existing  one. 

(One  might  note — by  the  way — 


THE  HIVE  AND  THE  BEE   i6i 

that  there  is  not  to-day  among 
civilized  powers  a  monarchy ;  there 
is  not  a  republic.  There  is  only 
one  form  of  government  and  it 
may  be  defined  as  an  emporocracy 
— a  government  of  economic  in- 
terests— shop  rule;  and  the  dif- 
ficulty there  is  in  adjusting  it  to 
latter-day  htimanity  is  to  be 
found  in  its  impossible  alliance  of 
two  principles — the  oligarchy  of 
the  emporium  and  the  popular 
will.) 

The  transformation  has  begun. 

Civilization  is  planning  a  better- 
fitting  government.  We  shall  not, 
I  daresay,  participate  in  this  new 
and  more  harmoniously  ordered 
life;  but 


i62  THE  EGO  BOOK 

Here  is  the  essence  of  it 

It  is  in  view  of  that  life  that  we 
exist  and  for  it  that  we  suffer; 
we  create  it;  it  is  the  purpose  of 
our  Hf  e — the  purpose  of  our  strug- 
gle. (No  matter  how  blindly  we 
go,  vagabonds,  deserters,  enemies 
of  the  mass,  we  are,  in  spite  of  all, 
useful  and  necessary  to  those  who 
come  after  us.) 

Evolution  works  through  the 
mass  toward  a  type;  and  having 
created  a  stark  efficient  type  it 
uses  it  as  a  snubbing-post  to  haul 
the  mass  along  another  stage  on  its 
journey. 

Make  strong  your  ego — for  it 
must  carry  the  weight  of  humanity ! 

Let  it  go  fast  and  far  along  its 


THE  HIVE  APTO  THE  BEE   163 

imperious  way,  O  Philemon — for 
you  are  scouting  down  the  long 
road  where  humanity  must  follow. 

And  not  himianity  alone. 

Make  the  way  straight,  also, 
for  your  brother,  the  field-mouse, 
and  your  obscure  cousin,  the  eel. 


Chapter  VII 
How  to  be  Good  to  Yourself  When  Dead 
I 

FOR,  I  take  it,  you  will  die. 
And  when  you  are  dead 
some  pale  woman,  at  your 
head  (always  there  are  pale  women 
bending  over  their  dead),  will  say 
softly:  "A  man  is  dead.  A  himian 
rhythm  is  destroyed.  So  forever  is 
broken  that  human  form  of  the 
imiversal  rhythm  and  the  series  of 
things  it  accomplished.     He  Who 

Was  is  reduced  to  insensible  mole- 
164 


GCX)DNESS  PERPETUABLE    165 

cules  lost  in  the  universal  mechan- 
ism of  worlds."  And  the  sad 
woman,  standing  at  your  feet,  will 
say,  softly,  too:  "Pale  sister  of  the 
Man  Who  Was,  the  vibration  of 
life  cannot  be  destroyed  any  more 
than  midnight,  with  its  folds,  can 
muffle  the  vibrations  of  sound,  or 
stay  the  winged  vibratory  light. 
At  the  head  of  this  dead  man  is  a 
candle.  Stoop,  sister,  and  blow  it 
out.  Already  the  little  light  of 
the  candle  is  far  away — voyaging; 
a  second  has  passed  and  its  waves 
are  beating  on  the  edges  of  the 
moon;  in  fifty-two  minutes  it  will 
be  shining  on  Jupiter;  and  in 
exactly  seventy-one  years  and 
eight    months    and     twenty -four 


i66  THE  EGO  BOOK 

days  it  will  be  glittering  on  the 
metallic  peaks  of  the  star  Capella; 
and  passing  on.  You  cannot  stop 
that  ray  of  light  in  its  eternal 
way.  You  cannot  bid  any  vi- 
bration cease.  There  is  the  candle. 
Here  lies  the  man.  The  light 
of  the  extinguished  candle  is  on  its 
eternal  way ;  and  what  of  Him  Who 
Was?  That  force,  O  woman  at 
the  head  of  the  corpse,  was  per- 
petuable,  as  every  other  force.  Of 
what  tree  is  it  the  seed?" 

Thus  they  who  wash  the  corpse. 

No  one  has  ever  said  anything 
else — ^the  endless  retorts  of  "yes" 
and  "no." 

You,  perhaps,  know  that  nothing 
dies. 


GOODNESS  PERPETUABLE   167 

It  was  only  the  other  day  I  saw 
Cleopatra  dancing  in  the  wind. 
All  her  dainty  body,  naked  as  a 
flower,  swayed  for  me;  her  pretty 
body  that  all  the  stones  of  Egypt 
— all  the  herbs  and  incantations  of 
the  Magi — could  not  keep  cov- 
ered. She  was  dancing  in  a  gar- 
den. The  garden  is  that  of  the 
Bibliotheque  Nationale,  facing  the 
rue  Vivienne,  in  Paris.  You  may 
know  that  tmtil  1870  her  mummy 
— and  those  of  certain  attending 
high  priests — was  in  the  Biblio- 
theque. The  men  of  science  had 
unwrapped  the  mummy  in  order 
to  study  the  hieroglyphs  on  the 
wrappings.  During  the  siege  of 
Paris    (what   time  the  Vemis   of 


i68  THE  EGO  BOOK 

Milo  was  buried  in  a  subterranean 
crypt  of  the  Palais  de  Justice,  in 
reasonable  fear  of  the  barbarians) 
the  little  body  of  Cleopatra  was 
hidden  away  in  the  cellars  of  the 
rue  Richelieu.  There  she  lay  as  in 
the  damp  and  density  of  a  tomb. 
Came  peace;  and  when  they  took 
her  up  the  Queen  of  Egypt  poi- 
soned the  air. 

Thus  a  second  time  she  died. 
And  was  buried  in  the  garden. 
And  now,  in  strange,  many-co- 
lored flowers,  she  dances  in  the 
wind. 

(That  is  tolerable;  but  often 
when  I  have  pondered  upon  the 
somber  and  violent  things  that  go 
on  in  the  grave  of  "eternal  repose " 


GOODNESS  PERPETUABLE   169 

— the  swarming  helminths  and  all 
the  inexpressible  degradations  of 
this  poor  flesh  so  vainly  spiritual- 
ized— I  have  echoed  the  heroic 
wish  of  Saint  Paul — he  who  wished 
to  be  buried  by  the  lions  of  the 
desert !) 

And  there  is  of  the  Queen  of 
Egypt  nothing  left  save  the  dan- 
cing flowers? 

You  were  a  wise  Philemon  could 
you  answer  that.  Between  those 
two  thoughts — she  is,  she  was — 
open  chasms  of  darkness,  rocks, 
and  ghostly  tempests.  One  thing 
only:  You  cannot  destroy  a  vibra- 
tion. Not  that  of  the  smallest  star 
in  the  constellation  of  the  Virgin — 
a  light  vibration;    and    not  that 


I70  THE  EGO  BOOK 

vibration  which  was  the  essential 
Cleopatra.  Not  one  vibration ;  for, 
if  you  could,  this  poised  and  vi- 
brant universe,  moving  down  the 
groove  of  law,  would  fall  back 
into  chaos — the  tohu-bohu  whence 
it  has  so  painfully  emerged. 

That  much  is  true. 

Science  (that  chameleon!)  has 
confuted  in  the  last  few  years  the 
old  dogma  of  the  indestructibility 
of  matter;  but  it  has  not  yet 
established  the  dogma  that  the 
ego  is  destructible — any  more 
than  the  eternal-wandering  light 
is. 

I  met  an  old  scientist  once;  he 
was  sitting  by  the  seashore,  think- 
ing— with  austere  arithmetic — of 


GOODNESS  PERPETUABLE   171 

the  remainder  of  his  days;  at  last 
he  looked  up  and  said : 

"I  have  just  convinced  myself 
that  auto-survival  is  a  simple  act 
of  the  will." 

He  had  touched  the  edge  of  the 
great  truth.  If  that  will,  which  is 
the  ego,  has  truly  affirmed  itself,  it 
has  truly  made  itself  a  part  of  the 
permanent  whole.  And  if  you  are 
that  sort  of  an  ego  you  will  find  it 
far  easier  to  go  on  being  immortal 
than  to  make  an  end  of  it. 
Only  the  feebly  individualized  ego 
can  drop  back  lightly  and  with- 
out struggle  into  the  general 
mass. 

Whence  the  sad  necessity  one  is 
under  of  continuing  to  protect  his 


172  THE  EGO  BOOK 

ego,  even  when,  at  head  and  foot 
of  his  bed,  stand  the  sad,  pale 
women. 

II 

I  don't  think  it  matters  much 
how  a  man  dies.  Indeed  it  is  not 
in  a  man's  power  to  pick  or  choose. 
Everyone  brings  with  him  into  the 
world  the  principle  of  his  death. 
Thus  one  man  is  bom  with  a 
chimney-pot  on  his  head,  just  as 
another  man  is  bom  with  a  bullet 
in  his  breast.  Thus  it  was  inde- 
fectibly  in  the  destiny  of  Curie — 
the  discoverer  of  radium — to  die 
with  his  head  under  the  wheel  of  a 
dray.  It  was  in  the  destiny  of 
that  poet  of  blasphemy,   CatuUe 


GOODNESS  PERPETUABLE   173 

Mendes,  to  die  in  the  dirt  and  noise 
and  midnight  of  the  train-yard 
of  Saint  Germain;  and  nowhere 
else.  There  was  a  man  named 
Zola  who  spat  upon  and  befouled 
an  entire  generation ;  and  it  was  his 
perfect  destiny  to  die,  drowned  in 
the  vomit  of  his  dogs.  That  way 
and  no  other.  Always  man  car- 
ries with  him  the  principle  of  his 
death.  It  was  a  strange  and  terri- 
ble death  Huysmanns  brought  into 
the  world  with  him.  He  was  a 
worshipper  of  visible  things — of 
appearances ;  he  was  an  idolater  of 
insignificancies  and  glittering  toys ; 
and  he  was  stricken  with  a  disease 
so  rare  and  monstrous  they  had 
to  sew  up  his  eyelids.      He  had 


174  THE  EGO  BOOK 

lived  to  stare  and  death  blinded 
him. 

You  have  brought  your  death 
with  you;  you  may  have  a  hang- 
man's rope  in  your  pocket — or  a 
martyr's  crown.  That  is  merely 
the  fulfilling  part  of  a  destiny  the 
curve  of  which  was  plotted  back 
in  the  twilight  of  evolution.  It 
does  not  greatly  matter  so  long  as 
your  death,  like  your  life,  is  along 
the  line  of  the  law.  That  kind  of 
death  is  useful.  It  is  indeed  of  an 
ancient  and  epochal  utility.  For  it 
is  back  to  the  exact  point  where 
death  appeared — and  no  farther — 
that  we  can  trace  the  beginning 
of  evoluting  life.  The  protozoads 
are  immortal ;  that  is,  they  can  die 


GOODNESS  PERPETUABLE   175 

only  as  a  result  of  accident,  never 
of  old  age.  Perhaps  it  would  be  a 
trifle  more  precise  to  say  the  proto- 
zoad  is  neither  mortal  nor  im- 
mortal; it  ignores  death — having 
in  it  no  element  of  decay.  Now 
the  protozoad  is  the  ancestor  of  the 
metazoads,  which  are  mortal  be- 
ings. And  it  is  in  the  course  of  this 
transformation  that  death  makes 
its  appearance.  It  is  the  result  of 
an  adaptation — of  a  division  of  the 
cell  of  the  protozoad  into  the  cells 
of  the  metazoads.  So,  from  the 
evolutionist's  viewpoint,  life  be- 
gins exactly  where  death  appears. 
There  is  a  distinct  relation  between 
mortality  and  reproduction.  In 
other  words,  life  is  a  piece — defi- 


176  THE  EGO  BOOK 

nitely  measured — of  immortality. 
Death  serves  as  the  measuring-rod. 
That  is  its  utility.  It  makes  for 
the  variations  which  are  life.  It 
bisects,  at  a  certain  point,  the  long 
immortal  curve  of  life. 

Did  I  say  it  stopped  it? 

Nothing  can  stop  it.  Whether 
you  will  or  not  that  vibration, 
which  is  you,  must  go  on;  and  it 
must  go  along  the  line  you  have 
projected. 

The  ages,  timeless  and  limitless, 
lie  behind  your  ego;  but  they  lie 
before  it  also.  You  are  the  centre 
of  a  circle  which  has  no  circimi- 
ference.  All  time  and  all  space 
are  round  you.  You  are  in  eter- 
nity— like  a  ray  of  light,  speeding 


GOODNESS  PERPETUABLE  177 

past  Capella  and  past  ever-rising 
stars  beyond.  The  ego  must  go 
on;  and  it  must  follow  the  curve 
you  have  given  it  to  travel. 

Let  me  reveal  to  you,  Philemon, 
a  ghastly  and  abysmal  truth:  You 
are  immortal.  Like  that  far-off 
protozoadic  ancestor,  you  are 
doomed  to  ignore  death.  You 
may  change,  but  you  cannot  die. 
From  the  simple,  through  the 
complex,  to  the  simple;  that  has 
been  your  ego's  road  of  evolution. 
And  on?  Still  going  on.  To  what  ? 
To  exactly  what  you  have  made 
it  ready  for. 

Matter  is  vibration.  Living 
matter  is  nothing  else.  And 
matter  in  order  to  continue  to  live 


178  THE  EGO  BOOK 

must  adapt  itself  to  the  changes  of 
the  milieu  in  which  it  Hves.  What 
kind  of  an  immortality  you  are  to 
have  depends  entirely  upon  what 
milieu  you  have  fitted  yourself  to 
live  in.  If  you  have  trained  your 
ego  to  live,  it  will  live ;  and  (formid- 
able thought)  it  will  live  along  the 
line  you  have  started  it  in  this 
life. 

You  can  protect  yourself  (when 
dead)  by  so  living  in  this  life  that 
the  ego  will  follow  the  high  road 
and  not  the  low  road.  What  you 
are  you  will  be.  You  cannot 
change  the  curve  merely  by 
adroitly  slipping  out  of  your 
body. 

Take  the  high  road,  Philemon. 


GOODNESS  PERPETUABLE  179 

The  fairest  company  is  walking 
that  road. 

Ill 

"The  law  of  evolution,  briefly 
stated,  is  this:  That  forms  emerge 
from  a  common  fund  to  exhibit 
themselves  for  a  brief  existence  in 
manifested  form,  during  which 
nature's  forces  play  upon  them; 
their  life  within  responds;  the 
external  and  internal  forces  co- 
operate to  raise  the  manifesting 
entity  to  a  higher  level;  the  form, 
finally,  no  longer  answers  the  pur- 
pose of  its  existence;  it  dissolves; 
a  return  to  a  common  fund  is  made, 
and  a  subsequent  re-emergence 
takes  place.     The  gradual  perfect- 


i8o  THE  EGO  BOOK 

ing  thus  goes  on  until  the  limits  of 
that  kingdom  are  reached,  where- 
upon the  next  emergence  is  into 
a  higher  kingdom. " 

I  have  quoted  this  paragraph — a 
plain  statement — from  Mr.  F.  E. 
Titus,  a  very  distinguished  writer; 
and  I  have  quoted  it  in  order  to  ask 
you  to  apply  it  to  the  evolution  of 
the  ego.  The  law  of  evolution — if 
it  be  a  law  at  all — is  universal, 
and  its  application  to  the  imma- 
terial ego  is  quite  as  exact  as  its 
application  to  the  material  body 
in  which  the  Man  Inside  walks 
the  world.  The  gradual  perfecting 
goes  on. 

And  your  re-emergence,  Phil- 
emon, shall  take  place. 


GOODNESS  PERPETUABLE  i8i 
IV 

You  shall  emerge  into  a  fair 
company? 

You  will  find  exactly  the  com- 
pany you  vibrated  to  in  this  vi- 
bratory world ,  You  can  meet  only 
those  who  have  projected  their 
egos  out  upon  curves  similar  to 
your  own.  The  Inside  Passengers 
who  are  going  your  way  will  alight 
at  yoiu*  station  and  no  other.  And 
therefore,  Philemon,  if  you  would 
protect  your  ego — when,  at  last, 
your  strong  body  lies  dead,  with 
women  bending  over  it — live  well 
in  this  world;  create  only  such 
vibrations  as  you  would  care  to 
pass  eternity  withal.     And,  since 


i82  THE  EGO  BOOK 

all  is  vibration — thought,  aspira- 
tion, feeling — think  highly,  aspire 
nobly,  feel  purely. 

Then  shall  you  emerge  into  a 
fair  company. 


I  laid  down  my  pen.     I  said : 
"This  little  book  of  Good  In- 
tentions is  finished." 

And  then,  I  know  not  how,  my 
thoughts  went  out  to  a  sweet,  wild 
girl  I  knew  in  the  long  ago.  (Eyes 
the  color  of  a  bee,  little  Kathryn.) 
And  I  wondered  whether  she  were 
lonely  now.  Who  could  have  met 
her  when  she  went  forth?  Long 
files  of  hooded,  gray,  sacrificial 
women?    Perhaps   there   was   no 


GOODNESS  PERPETUABLE   183 

one  there ;  for  whenever  I  dream  of 
her  she  is  alone.  She  is  standing 
in  a  plain,  so  wide,  so  desolate,  so 
empty,  that  she  shudders  with 
loneliness;  for  she  is  alone  in  the 
desert  of  her  love;  and,  always,  as 
she  stands  there,  she  cries  aloud: 
"Is  there  any  Living  Man  here?" 
And  to  her  there  comes  no 
answer.  No  voice.  No  sound  of 
wings. 


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